Burglary the Year Before

A little over a year before he was murdered, Andrew Borden walked down to the police station to report a burglary at his home at 92 Second Street. The break-in had apparently happened in the middle of the day, when at least three of the people who lived there—Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget—were in the house. Officer Dennis Desmond, an acquaintance of the Borden family who had “practically grown up with the girls,” accompanied Andrew home.

Even though the police never identified a perpetrator, the blame on Lizzie fits nicely into the narrative of her bitter hatred for her stepmother, a hatred that a year later would explode into hatchet-wielding rage. But what does Desmond’s report actually say about the theft?

“On or about the 24th of June 1891, I was called into City Marshal’s office. Marshal Hilliard said, ‘Mr. Desmond, Mr. Borden says his house has been robbed. You go with him and see what there is to it.’ Mr. Borden and myself left the office and went direct to Mr. Borden’s house Second St. I found there Mrs. Borden, Emma Borden, Lizzie Borden, and Bridget Sullivan.”

“On 2nd floor in a small room on north side of house, I found Mr. Borden’s desk. It had been broken open. Mr. Borden said, ‘$80 in money and 25 to 30 dollars in gold, and a large number of horsecar tickets had been taken. The tickets bore name or signature of Frank Brightman.’ Brightman was a former treasurer of Globe St. Railroad Co. Mrs. Borden said, ‘Her gold watch & chain, ladies chain, with slide & tassel attached, some other small trinkets of jewelry, and a red Russian leather pocketbook containing a lock of hair had been taken.’ [Mr. Borden said,] ‘I prize the watch very much, and I wish and hope that you can get it, but I have a feeling that you never will.’ Nothing but the property of Mr. and Mrs. Borden was reported as missing.”

“The family was at a loss to see how any person could get in and out without somebody seeing them. Lizzie Borden said, ‘The cellar door was open, and someone might have come in that way.’ I visited all the adjoining houses, including the Mrs. Churchills house on the north, Dr. Kelly’s house on the south, Dr. Gibbs house and Dr. Chagnon’s house on the east, and made a thorough search of the neighborhood to find some person who might have seen someone going, or coming from Mr. Borden’s house, but I failed to find any trace. I did get a 6 or 8 penny nail which Lizzie Borden said she found ‘in the keyhole of the door,’ leading to a sleeping room on 2nd floor, east end of building. So, as far as I know, this robbery has never been solved.”

“P.S. Mr. Borden told me three times within two weeks after the robbery in these words, ‘I am afraid the police will not be able to find the real thief.’”

The report doesn’t mention which family members were inside the house at the time of the burglary. Lizzie would later tell Alice Russell that she was there along with Emma and Bridget, and, after the murders, various newspapers would report Andrew and Abby were in Swansea at the time, so it is assumed to be true. Although, curiously, the New Bedford Evening Standard, in a news item dated September 23rd, 1892, claimed that when Bridget Sullivan was asked by Lizzie’s attorney Melvin Adams about the burglary and where the family was at the time, she testified that “all of them” were home. (When and where she was asked this is unclear, as if she was asked it at the preliminary hearing, which took place the month before this article was published, it does not appear in the official hearing transcript.)

Emma seemed to confirm that the entire family was home to Andrew Jennings in a conversation with her he recorded in his journal. In Emma’s words:

“$75 or 80 in money some horse car tickets—the only thing of father’s though his desk was ransacked—gold watch and chain, breast pin, and earrings plain Roman gold no stones, shawl pin with ball at each end and some other little things. First I knew of it I was sitting in front room. Heard father knock on door of my room (now Lizzie’s), he called me—I unlocked the [adjoining] door and went in—everything was thrown about. He said, ‘What do you think of this?’ I thought at first Mrs. B had gone off and left them so—He said he found door to hall open and nail in lock—put it in hands of officers—asked us to say nothing about it—we talked about it. Remembered we were all shelling peas in the dining room in morning, Lizzie and father and myself with dining room [door] shut. Officer took up a piece of chain, showed to Mrs. Borden, she said it did not look like hers.”

Notice that in Emma’s telling it was Andrew who found the nail in the lock of the door to his room and “put it in the hands of officers,” while Desmond, in his report created after Lizzie was arrested for the murders, claimed it was Lizzie who found the nail. Either way, the tranquil domestic scene of Andrew and his daughters engaged in shelling peas together, even as their house was being robbed beyond the closed door, doesn’t exactly fit with the idea that it was Lizzie who was up to no good while Andrew and Abby were out of town in Swansea. In fact, it doesn’t fit the picture painted by the prosecution of life inside the Borden House much at all.    

Emma’s recollection that Andrew asked them to say nothing about it was apparently true, because Emma and Lizzie’s closest friend, Alice Russell, didn’t learn of it until Lizzie’s visit to her house the following year, on August 3rd, the night before the murders. (Although, as Desmond reported that he’d spoken to all Andrew’s neighbors about the theft in his investigation, this would suggest at least some people were aware.) Alice disclosed her conversation with Lizzie in written form for Knowlton, a conversation in which Lizzie was trying to convince Alice that she had good reason to worry for her family’s safety. She told Alice about the house being robbed “in broad daylight, with Emma and Maggie and me there.” Alice recorded the rest of their talk as follows:

“And I said, ‘I never heard of that before.’ And [Lizzie] said, ‘Father forbade our telling it.’ So I asked her about it, and she said it was in Mrs. Borden’s room, what she called her dressing room. She said her things were ransacked, and they took a watch and chain and money and car tickets, and something else that I can’t remember. And there was a nail left in the keyhole; she didn’t know why that was left, whether they got in with it or what. I asked her if her father did anything about it, and she said he gave it to the police, but they didn’t find-out anything; and she said father expected that they would catch the thief by the tickets. She remarked, ‘Just as if anybody would use those tickets’.”

Again, we see that Lizzie also recalled it was Andrew who handed the nail to Officer Desmond, so one wonders why he wrote it up differently. The more important point is that Lizzie clearly knew from the time of the robbery that the police would try to identify the thief by the use of the horsecar tickets. This strategy featured prominently in reports about the robbery that surfaced after the murders, including this cheeky article in the Fall River Globe which appeared on August 20th, 1892.

“The murder of Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Borden has brought to light the fact that several months ago the Borden house was robbed of about $100 in cash, an old watch and a lot of horsecar tickets. Two police officers … concluded that the burglar would use the car tickets and in order to apprehend the villain they notified every horsecar conductor in town to be on the lookout for complimentary tickets. Those taken from the Borden house were the blue tickets known as ‘directors’ complimentary tickets’ and they were at about the same time furnished to the members of the Board of Aldermen … At regular intervals the policemen would meet the conductors and get reports. It was surprising how many people were riding on blue tickets. And still more surprising the kind of people who were sporting directors’ tickets. The police soon discovered that about every good-looking girl they met was a director in the Globe Street Railway, at least they rode on a blue ticket … They got at the bottom of the affair however by visiting two very pretty all-night French girls who at the time lived on Fourth street. Each of the beauties had a pocketful of blue tickets … The policemen accused them of getting the tickets by favor of a certain alderman and they acknowledged the soft impeachment. The mystery of the tickets was solved, but the robber of the Borden house is yet unpunished.”

So far, we find no evidence that anyone believed Lizzie committed the robbery before the murders. But once Lizzie became a suspect in the killing of Andrew and Abby, she apparently also became a suspect of the June burglary in the minds of the police, and from there, in the minds of reporters.

Marshall Hilliard Has a Theory

On September 24th, the New Bedford Evening Standard described a scene, presumably from the preliminary hearing which took place the month before, in which Bridget Sullivan was in the midst of being questioned about the burglary by Melvin Adams.

“About this time lawyer Jennings pulled the coattail of Mr. Adams and there was a whispered conference. The district attorney [Knowlton] winked at Marshal Hilliard and the marshal smiled. The robbery business was then dropped by Mr. Adams … Why? Yes, the police did know that the house was burglarized, and they knew that some money and a watch had been missing after the burglary. And the police know something more, without a doubt. They know why the case wasn’t followed, but it is questioned by those who ought to know if the police have found out yet just what the whole result of that robbery was, and how many articles disappeared besides the money and watch. It would not be surprising if it came out before this thing ended that the Borden themselves stopped the police inquiry into that robbery, and it may be that Marshal Hilliard is backed up in his opinion of what course to take because he is in possession of certain facts which lead him to believe the worst of Lizzie Borden. It is hinted strongly that there were things taken from that house that an ordinary thief would have no use for, and that the money and watch were simply taken as a blind to throw Mr. Borden off track. And when the real object of the thief was discovered, proceedings were stopped and a family scandal checked right there. This is the theory of one or two who have been following the case pretty closely and who are well acquainted with all the parties interested.”

The details of Jennings yanking on the coattail of his colleague, and Knowlton winking at a smirking Hilliard, were the only actual events this reporter witnessed, and even that is questionable, as the testimony he claimed to have heard is not in the trascripts of the preliminary hearing. In answer to his own questions as to why the meaning of this exchange between police marshal and district attorney, the reporter came up with a piece of conjecture that “would not be surprising,” based on rumored “hints” of what “may be,” as well as “theories” from unnamed sources. He, of course, couldn’t possibly have known what was in the minds of either man, but he wrote as if he did know. That was not reliable reporting. Several months later, on November 22nd, the same newspaper reported in the same vein:

“Chief Hilliard told the members of the grand jury who the mysterious burglar was who stole Mrs. Borden’s watch … The chief said he was satisfied that Lizzie committed the theft and went on to say how he convinced Mr. Borden that such was the case. All the articles stolen at that time were the property of Mrs. Borden and included, beside the watch and money, a quantity of free horse tickets. A number of persons were found presenting free tickets who were not entitled to them. The police asked them where they secured these little pasteboards. They said Lizzie Borden gave them to them. Lizzie had never had any of these tickets until after the theft from Mrs. Borden, so Mr. Borden requested that there be no further investigation.”

Here we have the reporter doubling down on the story, claiming to know what Marshal Hilliard testified to before the grand jury. But grand jury testimony is secret testimony, and there are no transcripts of what Hilliard actually said. While someone familiar with the proceedings, or even Hilliard himself, certainly may have talked to the reporter, he didn’t quote Hilliard or anyone else directly, and he himself was not present. Meanwhile, according to what Jennings recorded in his journal, “Nothing before Grand Jury except Marshal kept asking [Knowlton] if he wanted him to tell about the Burglary.”

Furthermore, we have no actual documentation that Andrew Borden requested that the investigation into the robbery be “dropped.” What the documentation shows is that he repeatedly said he had no confidence the thief would ever be caught with the kind of pessimistic despair felt by most victims of burglary. We also have documentation that Lizzie knew the police would try to use the tickets to identify the thief, so if she did steal the tickets, it’s doubtful she would have blithely started handing them out to friends.

It seems likely Hilliard did suspect Lizzie could be guilty of the burglary, but whether he decided this before the murders, or after the murders when it would help support his conclusion that Lizzie was the killer of Andrew and Abby Borden, is so far unknown (perhaps the Hilliard Papers, in the possession of the Fall River Historical Society, might say differently when they come to light). But one wonders why—if Hilliard really did have some kind of proof that Lizzie committed the burglary, what with a “number of persons” telling police that Lizzie had given him those tickets—then why didn’t he give his proof to the prosecution to use in the jury trial? And, why weren’t any of the persons who’d been given the tickets summoned to testify? And, why did none of these persons ever step up to speak to reporters who would have loved to put such an allegation in print? And, why didn’t any police officer go on the stand to confirm that Andrew had asked them to drop the investigation? In other words, why did the allegation against Lizzie that Hilliard reportedly shared with the grand jury vanish into thin air by the time of the trial?

The Evolution of the Legend

While the suspicion that Lizzie may have committed the burglaries had wilted from lack of evidentiary air by the time of the trial, it would later gain new strength in the hands of  writers reviewing the case. Edmund Pearson, writing in 1937, seems to be the first to take Hilliard’s suspicion and present it as a fact that Lizzie did indeed secretly commit this burglary. “Miss Lizzie,” wrote Pearson, “the most voluble at this interview, suggested the cellar door as the thief’s place of entry, and produced a large nail which she had found in the keyhole of a bedroom door. No clue and no solution were ever discovered, and Mr. Borden soon showed a disposition to abandon the inquiry. The police believed he was not wholly in doubt as to the identity of the robber.” Pearson, of course, had no idea whether Lizzie was “most voluble” during Desmond’s visit to the house, it’s a storytelling flourish. Nor does Pearson have support for his assertion that Mr. Borden was of a “disposition to abandon the inquiry.” All he had was that Andrew three times said he had no faith the thief would be caught, which Pearson re-characterized as Andrew repeatedly asking to “drop” the inquiry.

Victoria Lincoln, who seems to have taken all Pearson’s conjectures as gospel truth, took the story and further embellished Lizzie’s supposed excitement in talking to the officer, then added a new creative touch of her own, claiming that the burglary was the reason Andrew began locking his bedroom door and leaving the key on the mantle. This, said Lincoln, was Andrew’s passive-aggressive message to Lizzie that he knew she was the thief. This is purely Lincoln’s invention, but it has been taken to be true by other writers, who sometimes add their own fanciful twists. Florence King, writing in The New Republic in 1992, suggested that with Andrew’s placement of the key in plain sight, “Lizzie knew she was being tempted to touch it; she also knew that if the key disappeared, she would be suspect. In one fell swoop, Andrew made it clear that he was simultaneously trusting her and distrusting her and warning her without saying a word.” (For more on that key on the mantle, see Keys.)

These different versions of the story do not match any known facts. Emma, Lizzie, Bridget, and John Morse all testified to the family’s long habit of locking both external and internal doors. (Lizzie kept her own bedroom door locked as well.) Plus, the nail left behind in the door keyhole means the door was locked before the robbery, so clearly Andrew had already started locking that door. The reason Andrew left the key on the mantle was not a coded message to Lizzie, but simply to make it handy for Abby to use when she wanted to get into her own bedroom.

Through the Lens of Guilt

Many students of the Borden murders believe it is absolutely true that Lizzie sneaked upstairs to her father’s bedroom door, picked the lock with a nail (back then nails were more flat and square than the rounded ones we have today), or otherwise gained entry to the room known as “Abby’s dressing room,” then ransacked his desk and stole his money, horse car tickets and other items. Of course, even if she did such a thing, that wouldn’t be actual evidence of guilt in the murder of Andrew and Abby, but it would nudge the observer toward considering her guilt more likely. It paints a picture of Lizzie as dishonest, manipulative, and cruel to Abby in particular, as many of the things taken from the locked desk had sentimental value to Abby.

Some even go so far to say as Lizzie perpetuated the burglary as a “dress rehearsal” for the murders she was planning to carry out at some point, and that she knew she would need to set a precedent to prove that strangers could get into the house. This, of course, would mean that Lizzie was planning the murders over a year in advance, and most wouldn’t go that far. Still, many do consider it Lizzie’s first volley in the psychological battle between her and her parents. Not only to harass and frighten Abby, but possibly to show her father he was not in control. Or maybe even get back at Andrew for perceived slights, “the way an angry puppy will poop on the floor,” as one Lizzie Borden forum poster put it. Although another poster had a more somber interpretation, saying the incident revealed that “Andrew was in a life-or-death power struggle with Lizzie and didn’t realize it.”

Through the Lens of Innocence

For those who think Lizzie most likely innocent, the post-murder attempt to pin the burglary on Lizzie over a year after the fact is a desperate move to bolster a weak case. There was no evidence or suspicion against Lizzie regarding the burglaries mentioned at any time before the murders. In fact, according to Leonard Rebello in his book, Lizzie Borden: Past and Present, “There had been a series of robberies in Fall River just preceding this, and a young man was finally tripped up with a lot of sized keys in his possession.” Although that young man was not specifically considered to be the culprit of the Borden robbery, Rebello does go on to list other newspaper articles that appeared in early 1892 about other burglaries that were plaguing the neighborhood. Likewise, Andrew Jennings kept a Jan ’92 article in his journal that describes a different burglary in Fall River that resembled the Borden burglary.

Second Street was not a residential neighborhood of the well-to-do, it was a street near the heart of the city with just as many businesses operating on the thoroughfare as private homes. There were stores, stables, boarding houses and all manner of people going to and fro, and it was clearly not the safest neighborhood. Besides the June 1891 burglary of the house, the Borden barn was broken into twice in the Spring of 1892. Andrew didn’t just insist on keeping all the outer doors locked, he also put barbed wire atop his back fence and kept a heavy knobbed stick under his bed with which to confront any possible intruders. Meanwhile, Lizzie and Emma kept their clothes closet locked as well. It’s doubtful they did this because they feared Bridget might help themselves to one of their dresses. Obviously, the entire family was wary of intruders and potential burglars.

Desmond’s police report states Lizzie told him, “The cellar door was open,” and the family thought perhaps the thief had come in by that way. It’s unclear whether the cellar door was actually standing open, or if it was merely unlocked, but either way, Bridget later testified the cellar door was normally unlocked on days when she carried just-washed laundry outside to hang it to dry. So perhaps this robbery took place on such a day, when the door wasn’t as carefully locked as it was on other days. This would make Lizzie’s odd question to Bridget the day after Andrew and Abby’s murders suddenly make more sense; a police officer reported that he heard Lizzie ask Bridget if she had been “sure” the cellar door was locked the day before. This suggests Lizzie may have been remembering how the family believed the thief had got into the house through the cellar door the previous year, and was wondering whether her father’s killer had got in the same way. (According to a Hiram Harrington interview published in newspapers in the days after the murders, Lizzie wondered aloud to him whether the burglary the year before could have been connected to the murders of her father and stepmother.)

As for the “suspicious” fact that only Andrew’s room and desk were broken into, if the thief got into the house through the cellar door (or even an unhooked screen door on the side of the house), then it’s doubtful the thief would start wandering through the lower part of the house where the family was sitting together and shelling peas; he would continue up the back stairs to quietly get his hands on whatever valuables he could find.

Ironically, even as Marshal Hilliard was reportedly cooking up suspicion that Lizzie had staged the burglary of her own home, the district attorney and attorney general were exchanging letters in which Attorney General Albert Pillsbury said he’d been told that Bridget Sullivan might have been involved. We find this passage in a letter from Pillsbury to Knowlton dated on September 3rd, 1892.

“I hear considerable said of the burglar theory evidently based on a former alleged burglary of the Borden house … Some people think Bridget was in on the former burglary, and in this affair too as a confederate of the burglar. Of course, this is very thin, but it is the only theory I have heard suggested which is capable of belief for a moment, and this is doubtless is believed by some.”

Andrew’s murder shows he clearly had an enemy, and while many believe that enemy was his own daughter, what if it wasn’t? What if there was another who wished him ill and was circling him from the shadows? Lizzie told police that one evening not long before the murders she saw a man sitting on the back steps of her house who, once he saw her, slipped off into the night. It is not inconceivable that, as Lizzie herself wondered to her uncle, the same someone who walked into Andrew’s house once during an ordinary weekday to help himself to Andrew’s property could have been emboldened by his success to go back and take Andrew’s life.

Author’s Take

The belief that Lizzie was responsible for the 1891 burglary of her home has been repeated so many times that most people take it to be proven fact, when it was anything but. It was always rumor and gossip, based on conjecture from those casting about for reasons to believe Lizzie had done the horrible act she was accused of doing. I believe if police had credible proof that Lizzie had been the culprit, that proof would have appeared in court instead of rumor-based newspaper stories. The defense brought up the burglary several times, but the prosecution broached it only at the end, when Knowlton mentioned in his closing “that burglary in the daytime of Mrs. Borden’s things” (as if it was only Abby’s things that had disappeared). Emma’s pea-shelling memories of the day it happened, and of the family confusion that followed, as well as their acknowledgment that “the cellar door was open,” also make me doubt that Lizzie was the stealth burglar, especially with newspapers reporting that similar burglaries had happened in the area around the same time.

Of course, Lizzie doesn’t have to be guilty of the burglary in order to be guilty of the murders; one thing may have nothing to do with the other. But the Lizzie-as-burglar story is a prime example to me of how so many myths about her persist because they help build a compelling narrative. I make my living as a screenwriter, and if I was developing a script about Lizzie I would definitely capitalize on such gossipy stories from newspapers and turn them into scenes that set up rising tension and foreshadow what is to come.

In the end, the burglary incident proves only one thing for certain—someone bent on mayhem, whether Lizzie or an intruder unknown, could move around the house with other people inside unaware of their movements and leave them shocked at the discovery.