Crowe Hatchet

On June 15, 1893, just after the prosecution rested its case in the Lizzie Borden trial and her lawyers began presenting their defense, the Fall River Evening News came out with the provocative headline: “I Have Found Lizzie Borden’s Hatchet! A New Sensation!”

“About 7 o’clock last evening, a number of boys were engaged in playing ball on Third Street, in front of John Crowe’s barn, which is nearly in the rear of the Borden estate, the north side of the barn serving as a fence between Dr. Chagnon’s orchard, which is directly in the rear of the Borden house, and the Kelly lot, on which the barn stands … During the game, the ball was knocked, or thrown, upon the roof of the main barn, and Master Arthur Potter, 14 years old, son of Caleb C. Potter, of the water works office, scaled the building in quest of it …

Near the northwest corner of the main building—about six feet from the west and four feet from the north line of the structure—on the northeast corner of the roof, he found a hatchet of ordinary size, lying with the head toward the southeast, the handle towards the northwest corner. He forgot the ball and he rushed for the hatchet and then rang out his salute to the boys below: I’ve Found Lizzie Borden’s Hatchet! …

The boys were much excited over the find, and it was given to Mr. Potter, the father of the finder, who now has it in his possession. He at once notified the police and tried to find Mr. Jennings, but in this was unsuccessful.

The article went on to describe the hatchet as an “ordinary shingle hatchet with a blade 3-3/4 inches in length. It was covered in rust and part of this was scraped off by the boy when found. It has the appearance of having been comparatively new and but little used. The handle, which is 13-1/2 inches long, looked weather-worn as if it had been long exposed to air, sun, and storm. The underside of the handle had a few slight stains, but nothing that resembled spots. Near the head of the hatchet, these stains were more pronounced.” Yet another article from the Associated Press that appeared that day carried this intriguing detail: “Some of the particles of rust being removed a slight coloring of gilt was disclosed, which would either indicate that the hatchet was at one time used as an ornament or was quite new when lost or discarded.”

Meanwhile, other papers were publishing their skeptical opinions, saying the find was a little too coincidental and suggesting the boys may have purposely placed the axe there in the hope of causing a sensation. The Fall River Daily Globe, firmly in the Lizzie was guilty camp, was especially sarcastic, telling its readers that another search of the roof might allow police to find “that note which Mrs. Borden is alleged to have received from a sick friend.”

A few days later, newspapers began reporting that the rightful owner of the hatchet had been discovered. “The owner of the Potter-Borden hatchet has in all probability been found,” said the Fall River Daily Herald of June 17th, 1893. “Carl McDonnell, a carpenter employed by William Smith of Second Street, did some work for Dr. Chagnon about the time of the murder, or a little later, and lost a hatchet of a description similar to this one. There are so many hatchets of a similar make that it is almost impossible to identify any one in particular unless marked for that purpose. The axe undoubtedly belongs to McDonnell.” How this “lost” hatchet may have found its way onto an 18-foot-high roof two lots away was not addressed in the article.

From there, the story of the Crowe barn hatchet soon faded away, swallowed up in the news of Lizzie’s acquittal. The police clearly did not give it any more consideration; thus, neither did the press. The story ultimately became a minor footnote to the case, largely unknown to the majority of those who studied the murders and published narratives about them over the decades.

It wasn’t until 1992, an entire century later, that the story resurfaced when Borden scholar Robert Flynn published a 16-page pamphlet he called “Lizzie Borden and the Mysterious Axe.” In that short work, he quoted the 1893 articles about the Crowe Hatchet and asserted his belief it was the weapon Lizzie used to kill her parents. Since then, many students of the case have been intrigued by the possibility it was indeed the weapon used in one of the most famous murder cases in history, and recent message boards feature numerous discussions about it. For many who are swayed toward believing it was a good candidate for the murder weapon, they cite a small but significant detail that came out of the story: the gilt that still clung to edge of the hatchet.

A Gilt-y Hatchet

When Hosea Knowlton’s papers on the case against Lizzie Borden were published by the Fall River Historical Society in 1994, eager students of the Borden case learned that Knowlton had been sent a letter by Dr. Frank Draper, a prominent Boston medical examiner and Harvard professor, on May 31, 1893, less than a week before the trial against Lizzie was set to begin. In the letter he told Knowlton that when he recently examined Abby Borden’s skull, he made what he called an “important” discovery.

“On one of the cuts in Mrs. Borden’s skull, near the right ear, there is a very small but unmistakable deposit of the gilt metal with which hatchets are ornamented when they leave the factory. This deposit (Dr. Cheever confirmed the observations fully) means that the hatchet used in killing Mrs. Borden was a new hatchet, not long out of the store … Perhaps this is not new information either to you or Dr. Dolan; it was new to me and seemed important enough to justify immediate conveyance to you. The shining deposit can be seen with the naked eye; it is plainly visible with the use of a lens, when once its situation is indicated.”

As Flynn had only recently published his pamphlet quoting stories about the hatchet found atop the Crowe barn, including the story that mentioned the gilt remaining on the edge of weather-worn hatchet, Draper’s letter seemed to add credence to the theory that the hatchet found by the Potter boy was indeed the murder weapon. As this theory was discussed and passed along, the understanding that Draper made this discovery nearly ten months after the murders, and not during the autopsy on Abby conducted the week after the murders, became muddied. Many people came to believe, and still do believe, that this gilt was found in Abby’s actual fleshy wound; or, as the author of Whack Job put it, that the gilt was “found in Abby’s ruined right ear.” In actuality, the substance was found long after Abby’s head had been removed, and the flesh rendered from the skull by being boiled in a lobster pot. It would have been all but impossible for any gilt to still cling to the edge of the missing bone in Abby’s flesh-less skull after such an intensive process. So how to explain Draper’s finding?

The answer also apparently lies in the Knowlton Papers, which features a previous letter from Draper to Knowlton, dated May 28th, several days earlier, in which he tells Knowlton, “Two of the medical experts for the defense, by the way, have made their appearance …” and “Both these gentlemen studied the skulls and bony fragments at my office, while I sat in a room nearby within easy call, but not where I could hear conversation when their door was shut.”

While the defense did not call Drs. Dwight and Richardson, their own medical experts, to testify at the trial, clearly the defense had permission to examine the skulls. We also hear from Arthur Phillips, a lawyer with the defense team, of an “experiment” they themselves conducted during their examination of the skulls.

“Many cuts appeared within its bony structure and at one place the hatchet cut was plainly nitched on both sides of the inner part of the skull. Mr. Adams was about to claim to the jury that the cutting must have been done by a weapon of very unusual make and was so confident of his position that he went to a nearby hardware store and purchased a hatchet which seemed to be of the correct size and planned to exhibit it to the jury and compare it with the notches as an illustration to his claim. He was urged by Governor Robinson to make a private test first and reluctantly did so, only to find that the fit was perfect, so that it became clear to us that an ordinary new style of hatchet was used by the murderer.”

Clearly, a new hatchet from a hardware store (edged with gilt on the blade as most new hatchets were) was placed into the cuts on Abby’s skull during this experiment. This is undoubtedly how the gilt discovered by Draper was left behind. No other medical expert who examined the skulls in the months before the trial, and before Draper got to it, had noticed the gilt that Draper said was plainly visible to the naked eye. Thus, the gilt in Abby’s skull is not good evidence that a “new” hatchet was used on Abby, or that the Crowe Hatchet was more likely than any other to the be the actual murder weapon.

But are there other indicators that could sway one to believe it could be the guilty hatchet? Yes and no. It depends on how one interprets some questions that are not answerable today by anything other than speculation.

What Kind of Coincidence?

When the story about the discovery of a hatchet atop the Crowe barn came out, many in the press thought the timing of the discovery—in the middle of Lizzie’s trial for murder—too coincidental to be taken seriously. They were certain it had to be hoax perpetrated by the boys themselves to gain attention, or perhaps by an adult directing them. Although, at least a few of the boys were apparently interviewed by reporters, so it’s hard to believe that, if it was a hoax, not one of them tripped over their story or inadvertently let the cat out of the bag.

But the coincidence could also be interpreted in a different way. A hatchet found mere feet from the Borden yard, so near the house where a horrific hatchet murder had taken place, a murder in which a convincing murder weapon was never found, a weapon that was believed to have a blade the same length as the found hatchet, is too coincidental to dismiss. Just as Pearson said of the Handleless Hatchet, the Crowe Hatchet neatly “fit the requirements” of the murder weapon used and was found in the right proximity. It also seems to neatly solve the mystery of how the weapon was able to mysteriously vanish from the crime scene in the middle of the day with dozens of possible witnesses all moving around the premises. Tossed up onto the barn roof, out of the view of all the officers searching for it, where the rain and snow that pelted it over the following ten months would have erased any trace of blood, it would have been a brilliant way to be rid of the evidence. However, even if it was indeed the murderous hatchet, the question of who threw it up there would remain open.

Was it Lizzie, or was it an Intruder?

If an intruder did gain entry to the Borden house, and killed Abby and Andrew Borden and made his escape while Lizzie was up in the barn, the most logical way to avoid being seen would have been to slip out the screen door on the side of the house, which would have allowed him to quickly disappear from view behind the house and into the shade of the pear trees. Then, using the lumber pile stacked against the back fence to climb atop the fence and go over into the Chagnon yard, he would have likely seen the flat roof of the Crowe barn just to his right. It would have been fairly easy to toss the hatchet up onto that roof, or even onto one of the higher structures of the barn (although they had peaked roofs) and then jump down into the Chagnon orchard to quietly move through the shadows of the thickly-leafed trees to get to Third Street. Yes, 18-year-old Lucy Collett was sitting on the Chagnon porch facing Third Street, but she herself said she wouldn’t have looked over her shoulder toward the orchard unless a noise had drawn her attention.

Those in the Lizzie-is-guilty camp will, of course, firmly say it was Lizzie who wielded the weapon, and will use the sighting of her by Hyman Lubinsky walking toward the house from the back yard—a sighting the defense used to corroborate her alibi of being in the barn—as evidence that she was actually in the yard flinging that hatchet up and away over her back fence. Perhaps so. Others will say there is no possible way to know, and of course, there isn’t. They might even say it doesn’t much matter in determining her guilt one way or the other, but that is only partly true.

Much of any belief in Lizzie’s innocence rests on the fact that there was no murder weapon found in the house; indeed, there was no weapon connected to Lizzie at all, at least if one discards the Handleless Hatchet as a possibility, as an arguable majority do. However, if the Crowe Hatchet was indeed the hatchet that killed the Bordens it would seem to put the weapon in Lizzie’s reach, so to speak. Then again, it might not, because there is another question that does not have an answer verifiable today.

Where was the Hatchet Found on the Crowe Barn?

The article announcing the discovery of the hatchet describes the Crowe barn in three parts, the main barn being “a flat-roof structure about 18 feet high. In the rear is an ell, the full width of the main building, but not more than 12 feet high. Still extending to the west and toward the Borden estate is a narrow flat roofed ell, about nine feet high. A six-foot fence runs diagonally and southeasterly from the north line of the first ell to the second ell, so that it is very easy to scale the roof.” The article further said the hatchet was found on the northeast corner of the main building, which was supposedly 18 feet from the ground.

However, newspaper sketches made of the Borden neighborhood at the time of murders show that the main building of the Crowe barn, as well as the middle section, had peaked roofs, and it was only the rear portion of the barn, a 9-foot-tall shed-like structure, that had a flat roof. That rear portion was also the structure nearest the corner of the fence that separated the Crowe yard from the Borden yard, which lay cater-corner to the northwest of the structure. If the hatchet was truly found on the northeast corner of the main part of the barn, as asserted in the article, it was clearly much too high and much too far from the Borden property to have been tossed there from the yard. That would effectively rule out Lizzie as the one who tossed it there. But perhaps an intruder scaling the fence or moving quickly through the Chagnon orchard directly behind the Borden property might have had a decent shot at getting it up onto a roof that was so high and so far from the Borden yard.

Of course, if the article was mistaken about which of the three barn structures the hatchet was found, and it was actually found on the low, flat-roofed structure nearest the Borden property, it likely would not have been overly difficult for anyone to heave it up there from the ground on the other side of the Borden fence, whether it was Lizzie or an intruder. Although, if there was a freshly-bloody hatchet sitting on the flat roof of the 9-foot-high barn, it would seem that Deputy Sheriff Wixon who, just after the murders, climbed up the lumber pile and over the corner of the fence to drop into the Crowe yard, would have been likely to spot it just feet away at eye level as he walked along the narrow stringer of the fence as he described doing. Or maybe not, maybe he was looking down so as to better navigate the tricky maneuver. Police officers were generally looking down—into the well, the privies, under the lumber pile and along the ground in their outdoor searches for the weapon; it’s doubtful any of them thought to look up.

Unfortunately, the confusing and possibly inaccurate reporting about the different structures make it impossible to be certain as to where, exactly, the Crowe Hatchet was found and how it may point toward, or away from, Lizzie’s guilt.

More Unanswerable Questions

Members on message boards dedicated to the Borden murders (such as the excellent forum at lizzieandrewborden.com) often discuss the Crowe Hatchet and come up with questions that seemed not to occur to reporters of the day. For example: If it was Carl Donnely’s “lost” hatchet, as several newspapers claimed, how in the world did it get on a roof two lots away from the Chagnon roof where he was working when he lost it? (A few in the guilty camp hazard the farfetched guess that Lizzie herself found it while walking along Third Street and picked it up and decided there at last was a way to solve the problem of her father and stepmother still being alive.)

Also, if it was sitting on the Crowe roof for ten months, why hadn’t anyone noticed the hatchet before from the windows of surrounding houses? (Well, say some, in summer it would likely have been hidden from easy sight by the foliage from many trees, in the autumn hidden by a layer of fallen leaves, and in the winter it would have been buried under snow.)

Another question: If the hatchet was thrown up there, it must have made an audible thud, so why didn’t the men working in the yard on the other side of the Crowe barn hear it? (The men working in the yard were stonecutters, and perhaps stonecutting makes enough noise to make even a loud overhead thud unnoticeable.)

Furthermore, wouldn’t throwing a bloodied murder weapon onto a roof be prohibitively risky? What if someone in the surrounding houses saw you? Someone in a house on the other side of the Kelly property saw a worker from the Crowe yard climb onto the Borden fence to grab some pears off their tree that morning. Or what if one missed? What if it slipped and fell to the ground where anyone could find it? What if it fell into the yard where the men were working? The only good answer to such questions is that a person brazen enough to commit a double hatchet murder in broad daylight on a busy street would probably be plenty enough brazen to fling a weapon onto a roof, risky or not.

However, the ultimate unanswerable question is: Why exactly did the police dismiss the hatchet? Did they really think it too unlikely to be the weapon for reasons they did not disclose to reporters, such as where it was found or some other quality of the hatchet itself? If so, then it probably was not the weapon used to murder the Bordens. Or did they consider it a viable possibility but think it merely “too late” to use in their case against Lizzie? Or perhaps they considered it a viable possibility but didn’t want to cast doubt on the Handleless Hatchet theory that they spent so much time supporting in the courtroom?

In his closing remarks, Robinson made a point of telling the jury that hatchets were continually being found, as we see in a May, 1893, story in the Fall River Evening News (reporting a new hatchet found under the headline “Borden Hatchets Again”). The article pointed out that “ever since the tragedy there has been no end of hatchets, but as nearly as can be ascertained, none of them have satisfied all the claims made for it.” In the courtroom, Robinson sarcastically wondered aloud if the prosecution was going to produce another possible hatchet and try to put it in Lizzie’s hand as well. Thus, it could be that the trial had already so exposed the weaknesses of the police department’s detective work and subjected them to such public ridicule that they more or less gave up investigating other possible leads or potential evidence. Whatever the reason, police did not take it seriously. The Crowe Hatchet all but disappeared from history and today remains as much a mystery in its potential relevance as the day it was found.