Lies (Lizzie’s Changing Story)

Lizzie Borden was a paragon of honesty, or so said her closest friends. When the women that Lizzie was supposed to join for a vacation trip to Marion the week after the murders were interviewed by a Boston Globe reporter, one friend described her as “a monument of straightforwardness.” That friend also famously declared, “I never shall believe, even if [Lizzie] were convicted of the deed, that she committed it unless she were to confess to it herself, and then the marvel would be greater to me that she had concealed her act than that she did it.”

Another longtime friend, Augusta Tripp, appeared at the inquest and told the district attorney that Lizzie Borden “could not bear deceitfulness. Being such an honorable person as she was, a square person.”

Although District Attorney Hosea Knowlton was barred by the judges from introducing Lizzie’s “involuntary” inquest testimony, which was full of statements that he believed to be false, he still spent a great deal of time pointing out why everything else Lizzie had said to police could not possibly be true. She claimed she went to the barn during the time Andrew was killed? “I assert that that story is simply incredible,” Knowlton told the jury. “I assert that that story is simply absurd, I assert that that story is not within the bounds of reasonable possibilities.” And why was that story so absurd? For one, it was simply too hot that day to go up into the barn.

Lizzie claimed she couldn’t finish heating her flats or ironing her handkerchiefs because “the fire had gone out” in the stove? Well, that was also a lie because Officer Harrington testified he’d looked in the stove at 12:30 that afternoon and saw “a little fire—I should [say] about as large as the palm of my hand.” Knowlton told the jury, “I need not say to you that if there was fire enough to be seen at half past twelve there was fire enough to work with an hour and a half before—before 11 o’clock.” She didn’t finish ironing them, he said, because she was more interested in fetching that hatchet.

Knowlton asserted Lizzie’s un-ironed handkerchiefs were “terribly significant” as they represented yet another deception that, taken together with other small deceptions as defined by Knowlton, painted a damning picture of Lizzie’s guilt in the murders of her father and stepmother. Adding further details to that picture were the inconsistencies in the different versions of the story she told police and other witnesses who asked Lizzie where she was when her father was killed.

The contradictions within Lizzie’s testimony at the inquest are thoroughly covered in elsewhere in this encyclopedia (see Inquest: Conflicting Statements). But as her answers to Knowlton’s questions were never heard by the jury, we will examine here the inconsistencies in what she told police and other witnesses, the alleged “lies” the jury actually did hear.

Iron to Fix a Screen or Use for Sinkers?

In the immediate aftermath of the murders, when the first people who arrived on the scene asked Lizzie where she was during the time her father was killed, she told most everyone that she had been out in the barn, in the hay loft upstairs. Yet she also gave two different reasons for why she’d decided to take herself up there. Actually, her reasons were the same, to go look for “a piece of iron;” however, the purpose for which she wanted that bit of iron varied.

To Alice Russell, Lizzie said she needed the iron to fix a screen on her window. As Alice testified at the inquest, “She gave me to believe they didn’t come together right or something. Lizzie says ‘you know there is everything up there, and I went up there to see if I could get a piece of tin or iron to fix it.’ The screen or window, I don’t know which she was going to fix.” Mrs. Marianna Holmes confirmed this at the trial, when she described what she heard Lizzie telling other people. “She said she went to the barn; and they asked her what for, and she said for something to fasten the screen. I cannot tell you whether at that time she said, ‘a piece of iron’ or ‘a piece of tin’ or ‘something.’ I heard her say all those things to different people.”

Yet, later that day, and again at the inquest, Lizzie didn’t mention the problem with her screen but claimed she had gone in search of iron or lead to make sinkers for the fishing lines she expected she might use on an upcoming trip. This story made its way into the newspapers within a day or two of the murders thanks to Hiram Harrington, Lizzie’s uncle by marriage, who went to visit Lizzie that first evening. He afterward gave an extensive interview to a reporter, which was printed in the Fall River Daily Herald, and was quoted as saying, “On leaving the house [Lizzie] says she went directly to the barn to obtain some lead. She informed me that it was her intention to go to Marion on a vacation, and she wanted the lead in the barn loft to make some sinkers … She told me it was hard to place the exact time she was in the barn, as she was cutting the lead into sizeable sinkers, but thought she was absent some 20 minutes.”

Nowhere else is there any claim that Lizzie had been cutting lead into sinkers, and certainly that was not part of Lizzie’s story at the inquest. But the change in her story from a search for iron to a search for lead is consistent with what Police Marshal Hilliard and Mayor Coughlin testified she’d also told them on Saturday evening, two days after the murders.

Offering two different reasons to go up into the barn to search for two different kinds of metals gave police another reason, besides the heat of the day, to disbelieve her claim of going into the barn at all. Her friends, however, seemed not to doubt she had two purposes in mind when she headed out the back door.

Radin tells us that that long before she testified at the trial, “Mrs. Holmes, the banker’s wife, had seen Lizzie on the day of the murders [and] was interviewed by reporters. In relating to them the story Lizzie told her, she said that Lizzie had gone to the barn to get a piece of metal to wedge a loose screen, but mainly, with the Marion trip on her mind, to see if she could find lead for sinkers.” Governor Robinson, Lizzie’s lead attorney, said the same thing in his closing argument, suggesting that Lizzie likely “had both things in mind,” and that it “was perfectly natural” to go off on a search that might serve a dual purpose.

Knowlton, however, strenuously disagreed, pointing out that this supposed screen that needed fixing was never identified. (Whether police officers themselves tried to identify it, or whether anyone ever asked Lizzie herself about it, he didn’t say.) He also suggested Lizzie’s evolving story about what she said she heard when she was returning to the house indicated the manufacture of yet more falsehoods.

The Distressing Noise

Lizzie’s story about what she heard on her return from the barn was also inconsistent. Bridget reported that when she asked Lizzie where she’d been while Andrew was being killed, Lizzie “said she was out in the backyard. She heard “a groan,” and she came in, and the screen door was wide open.” A short while later, Lizzie told Mrs. Churchill, “I was out in the barn. I was going for a piece of iron when I heard a distressing noise, came in and found the door open.” She likewise told Officer Mullaly that she’d been in the barn, but upon being asked whether she heard anything or not, she said she heard “a peculiar noise. I think it was something like a scraping. A scraping sound.” Although she characterized it in different ways, Lizzie made it clear to others that she’d heard some kind of noise that alarmed her as she was entering the house.

However, several days later, at the inquest, Lizzie did not mention hearing any noise at all upon approaching the house from the barn. In fact, she made it sound as if she had casually entered the house, telling Knowlton “I came into the kitchen … [then] went in the dining room and laid down my hat … opened the sitting room door and went into the sitting room; or pushed it open. It was not latched.” She said nothing about finding the screen door open, said nothing about hearing a noise. William Moody, in his opening statement for the prosecution, took pains to point out that shift in tone along with the ever-changing details of the story she told police.

Lizzie also seemed to have forgotten that on the day of the murders she had told Deputy Marshal Fleet she’d been ironing in the dining room after her father returned home, and before she went up into the barn, just as Bridget had described. At the inquest, which began five days after the murders, she told Knowlton that she hadn’t gone back to ironing at all but had gone straight out to the barn within five or ten minutes of Andrew coming back from his trip into town. These changes in her story are highly suspicious, and while some people are willing to consider that perhaps the traumatic shock of events was playing havoc with her memory (see Inquest: Mitigating Factors), most are convinced she was lying. She was doing a wretched job of it, yes, but she was lying nonetheless. As Knowlton put it, “the story on her lips … [had] no vestige of truth in it.”

A Virus of Deception

It should be pointed out that Lizzie Borden was not the only liar to show up in court at the jury trial, at least not according to the district attorney. In his closing argument, Knowlton also put other witnesses under his microscope and found them lacking in veracity.

First and foremost was Lizzie’s sister Emma, who Knowlton believed was manufacturing her testimony about seeing the Bedford Cord, the dress Lizzie had burned on Sunday, hanging in the clothes press on Saturday. He also accused her of outright lying when her memory of the dress-burning incident differed slightly from Alice Russell’s. Mrs. Bowen, too, was accused of not being truthful about the dress she remembered Lizzie wearing the day of the murders being a dark dress like the Bengaline Silk Lizzie claimed she was wearing.

A number of defense witnesses were also accused of dishonesty. Hyman Lubinsky, who corroborated Lizzie’s story of going to the barn, was treated to a dismissive wave of Knowlton’s hand when the district attorney suggested nothing this immigrant ice cream peddler said could be trusted as accurate. The two teenaged boys, Thomas Barlow and Everett Brown, who cast doubt on Officer Medley’s account of seeing nothing but undisturbed dust in the barn loft, were also accused of playing loose with the facts.

Ironically, the one person Knowlton defended as truthful was Hannah Reagan, the police matron who testified to overhearing a jail cell argument between Emma and Lizzie even after a good half-dozen defense witnesses testified that Mrs. Regan herself told them it wasn’t true. He also insisted that not one police officer would possibly perjure himself on the stand. Yet anyone else who said anything that in one way or another supported Lizzie’s innocence? Perjurers all, in Knowlton’s book.

Through the Lens of Guilt

Those in the guilty camp are quite certain an innocent person will tell a consistent story, and those who can’t keep their story straight—or who dodge questions by continually claiming not to remember—are almost certainly being dishonest. Look up “signs someone is lying,” and everyone from psychologists to law enforcement professionals will provide you a list in which “inconsistent stories with changing details” is the most reliable indicator that someone is not telling the truth. As one expert explained in Psychology Today, “the cognitive load of keeping track of falsehoods” makes it difficult for the liar to remain consistent. Other signs of dishonesty include contradicting previous statements or providing evasive answers, and Lizzie’s statements to police and to Knowlton at the inquest fit these definitions exactly. (To be fair, the same expert also said inconsistencies can also be the result not of purposeful lies but of other mental stressors, such as anxiety or trauma, which also exactly fits Lizzie’s situation.)

Some writers believe that Lizzie’s changing story reveals the evolution of an alibi to something she may have thought would be more believable. “It is interesting to watch Lizzie’s inch-by-inch censorings as she has time to think,” wrote Victoria Lincoln. “That fishing sinker, not thought up under pressure, but for the slow growth of twenty-four hours leisure in which to consider and invent, shows this same limitation. Why was she in the barn? Questioned, she thinks of actual objects in the barn and remembers a box of scrap metal. What use could scrap metal have? To fix a screen. But when her screens are proved sound, her mind is still hung up on the box of scrap metal. What else was in it? … Some folded lead. What is made of lead? Why, fishing sinkers. And there it rests, the best she can do for herself.”

But if that was Lizzie’s best, it was not nearly good enough. She flew too many red flags of dishonesty to dismiss. In Knowlton’s final summation, Lizzie was guilty of glaring “falsehood,” of “absurd and impossible alibis,” and of “contradictory stories that are not attempted to be verified.” Her protestations of innocence, he claimed, were as fraudulent as the “fraud upon officers” she committed by giving them the wrong dress. Ultimately, Lizzie Borden’s lies pointed irrevocably toward her guilt for the murders of father and stepmother. “It is proven,” Knowlton concluded, then repeated the words to the jury for good measure. “It is proven.”

Through the Lens of Innocence

Robinson, in his own closing argument, tried to explain Lizzie’s changing description of what she heard to the jury. “When a thing has happened, we imagine that we heard something; if it had not happened we should not have heard anything. How common that is. Then there were noises not connected with this tragedy which might actually have been heard—there are noises in that street.” He also suggested that in all the excitement, the witnesses trying to remember what Lizzie said, “may not have got it just right.”

Robinson was making the point that while we might be tempted to take everything a witness recalls as accurate truth—say, in the way a stenographer might capture their words in a transcript—witness statements are merely impressions filtered through the malleable memories of both the witness and the officer who reports the statement. Perhaps this is why Judge Dewey, in his charge to the jury, warned the jurors not to put too much weight on what witnesses said they remembered. “With respect to all verbal admissions, it may be observed that they ought to be received with great caution. [Such] evidence, consisting as it does in the mere repetition of oral statements, is subject to much imperfection and mistake … It frequently happens also that the witness, by unintentionally altering a few of the expression really used, gives an effect to the statement completely at variance with what the party actually did say.” So perhaps witnesses who described Lizzie’s words were accurately repeating what Lizzie told them she heard; perhaps they weren’t.

Either way, modern research supports that suspect who are telling the truth can also be wildly inconsistent in their stories. According the Innocence Project—a group of legal professionals that has helped to exonerate over 250 wrongfully convicted people—innocent people can and frequently do provide inconsistent stories to police due to factors such as fear, stress, memory lapses, or confusion, not to mention different kinds of psychological manipulation during interrogations. Perhaps that is why, for many observers anyway, the inconsistencies in Lizzie’s story actually do not point toward guilty but away from it. They will say, as George Robinson did, that only the guilty stick to their story and parrot a rehearsed script “line by line and dot by dot.”

A person who had no idea what was coming wouldn’t have had time to invent a story and would be more likely to tell a confused version of events, or to be grasping to understand exactly what happened. Certainly, most everyone else who learned of the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden in the frantic first hour after Lizzie discovered the first body—Bridget, Mrs. Churchill, Alice Russel, Dr. Bowen, John Morse—reported being confused and unable to remember exactly what happened or who said what. They contradicted themselves and each other in numerous ways. Clearly, they were also putting things together the best they could from inside the thick fog of shock.

As for the distressing noise Lizzie first spoke of, Robinson made a good point about sounds coming from the busy, noisy street. Lizzie may have heard some kind of noise and thought not much of it, at least until she found her father lying on the sofa, bloodied, clearly injured. She could have jumped to the conclusion the noise she’d heard was his groan or something like it as he was attacked. But eventually realizing that was impossible she may have tried to place the sound, interpreting it more as a scraping noise (perhaps the killer escaping through a window?) However, in the days that followed, nothing made sense to her and so she abandoned the effort to identify it.

Confusion after traumatic events is to be expected, and it isn’t necessary to conclude that Lizzie was purposefully lying. After all, she was famous for her honesty and for her lack of guile, so the well-known impact of shock on memory seems a more likely explanation for her inconsistencies, as well as the inconsistencies of other witnesses. It clearly didn’t occur to her keep track of what she’d said before or to otherwise keep her story straight—after all, innocent people don’t need stories—just as it didn’t occur to her to fake tears and swoons for police officers, or for Hosea Knowlton, her inquisitor. She was simply being her own bewildered self while trapped in a position of having to answer questions about things for which she knew no answer.

In the end, the members of the jury were also apparently not overly bothered by her inconsistencies either, and they did not agree with Knowlton’s argument that equated her changing story with purposeful falsehood. Even after sitting through the district attorney’s four-hour long closing which included a detailed list of her alleged lies, the jury quickly found her “not guilty.”

Author’s Take

It is clear that, as presented by witnesses and police reports, Lizzie often changed her story or contradicted herself or others. Those contradictions might very well qualify as lies and be indicators of guilt. I do not blame people for thinking so; I have often thought so myself. But I also understand her ever-changing version of events could also be the result of the confusion and overwhelm that follows a traumatic shock (see Inquest: Mitigating Factors).

It is also clear that because of an early presumption of guilt—rather than the presumption of innocence to which she was legally and morally entitled—Lizzie was judged differently than others who gave their statements to officers, or who raised their hands and swore an oath in court. Of course, one reason for that early presumption of guilt was police officers’ belief that Lizzie was lying to them from the beginning, but police are notorious for overestimating their own ability to determine whether someone is lying (see Rush to Judgment). The fact remains, a good many witnesses also changed their stories to a degree, or contradicted themselves or others, or testified to mistaken impressions. Even several police officers, when confronted with their own statements, eventually had to admit their recollections were in error.

For example, Deputy Marshal Fleet claimed to have lifted a dust-cloth covering the dresses in the clothes press when he quickly examined them on Thursday but later had to admit that there was no dust-cloth over the dresses at all. Was Fleet a liar or just mistaken? Officer Harrington on the stand was quite certain that when he first saw Andrew’s body, he observed “laced shoes” on his feet, and was not swayed when showed the crime scene photos with Andrew wearing Congress boots without any kind of shoelaces at all. He repeated that the boots in the photo did not match his recollection. Was Harrington a liar or just mistaken? Officer Mullaly testified he saw Fleet take the handle of the handleless hatchet from the box in which it was found; Fleet denied there was any handle at all in the box. Was one of them lying, or was one of them just mistaken?  

In his closing, Robinson reminded that jury about such discrepancies and conflicting stories from the officers who took the stand, saying “They knock their own heads together.” He then pointed out the hypocrisy of holding Lizzie to a standard that they themselves could not meet. “They make themselves, as a body of men, ridiculous, insisting that a defendant shall know everything that was done at a particular time, shall account for every moment of that time, shall tell it three or four times alike, shall never waver or quiver, shall have tears or not have tears, shall make no mistakes. But they, stripped of their blue clothes and in their citizens garb, show themselves to be only men and liable to human infirmities and errors.”

Robinson was absolutely correct; every other witness connected to the case was given latitude, again and again, for being imperfect humans trying to answer questions with imperfect memories. In his opening statement to the jury, prosecutor William Moody sympathetically noted Dr. Bowen’s mistaken impressions of the day by saying, he was “affected, naturally, by this dreadful series of murders.” Lizzie Borden, however, who was surely affected much more profoundly, was not given the same latitude, not even once. Nor is she likely to be given latitude by observers today, even though we know so much more about the impact of trauma on memory and can literally see its imprint on scans of human brains.

From where I sit, it makes no sense to just assume that Lizzie Borden was being dishonest with police; we cannot possibly know if she was lying and just didn’t do it well, or if she was suffering from the impacts of traumatic shock on her memory. Still, because so many of the other people involved with the case also displayed confused memories, and especially because so many of those who knew Lizzie were convinced that she was a scrupulously honest person, I lean toward believing that Lizzie Borden was not a liar, but was telling the truth the best she could in the horrific situation in which she found herself.