Lizzie’s Demeanor

When Officer Patrick Harrington arrived at the Borden house on August 4th, a little over an hour after Lizzie raised the alarm about the murders of her father and stepmother, he went upstairs to question Lizzie in her bedroom. In his report on the conversation, he wrote that he told Lizzie she didn’t need to answer all of his questions right then as, after her shock, she might want more time to recover her memory of events. “To this she replied, no, I think I can tell you all I know now, just as well as at any other time.” Harrington’s report continues:

“This conversation took place in Lizzie’s room, on the second floor, in the presence of Miss Alice Russell, who sat in a chair by the door which leads to the front hall, by which I entered Lizzie’s room. Miss Russell was very pale, and much agitated, which she showed by short sharp breathing and wringing her hands. She spoke not a word. Lizzie stood by the foot of the bed and talked in the most calm and collected manner; her whole bearing was most remarkable under the circumstances. There was not the least indication of agitation, no sign of sorrow or grief, no lamentation of the heart, no comment on the horror of the crime, and no expression of a wish that the criminal be caught. All this, and something that, to me, is indescribable, gave birth to a thought that was most revolting. I thought, at least, she knew more than she wished to tell.”

Harrington’s self-described revolting thought settled in over the next several hours, and in his report he described the exchange he had with his boss, Police Marshal Rufus Hilliard, when Hilliard arrived at the house later in the afternoon. “It was at this time I made known my suspicions of Miss Lizzie. To the Marshal I said ‘I don’t like that girl.’ He said ‘what is that?’ I repeated, and further said ‘under the circumstances she does not act in a manner to suit me; it is strange, to say the least’.”

Thus, the die was cast; Lizzie was already under suspicion for the murders because Officer Harrington didn’t like her demeanor—or at least didn’t think it appropriate for a woman who had just discovered her father’s butchered body. Where was the crying, the keening, the expressions of grief? Why wasn’t she agitated like the genteel Alice when police spoke to her?

A few days later, on August 8th, an interview with Mayor John Coughlin appeared in the Boston Post in which the man who had oversight of the police department shared his thoughts on why Lizzie could be capable of such a violent deed even though she was a woman. “This girl is not at all emotional. Her nature is not an excitable one. Her manner is cold, at times absolutely frigid. She does not show what she feels. She does not express what she thinks. We know nothing.” A few days after that, the inquest began, and as District Attorney Hosea Knowlton would write to his superior, the attorney general, one of the things most stood out to him in his exchange with Lizzie, a thing “that made it bad for her,” was “her manner.”

The Legend Takes Root

By the time of the preliminary hearing, newspapers from all over the country were agog at Lizzie’s infamous coolness under pressure. The New York Times said, “The most remarkable feature of the [hearing] has been the demeanor of Lizzie Borden. From start to finish she has manifested no feeling of weakness and has listened to the recital of the most cold blooded and shocking details of the crime with a perfectly impassive and unmoved countenance.” The Boston Herald agreed, saying, “There is nothing about the Fall River investigation to our mind more astonishing—not to say more abnormal—than the impressive coolness of the woman who is charged with murder,” before suggesting that only insanity could account for such coolness under pressure.

Lizzie clearly knew how she was being perceived because in the one interview she granted from her jail cell while awaiting her trial, she told Kate McGuirk, a reporter for the New York Recorder, “There is one thing that hurts me very much. They say I don’t show any grief. Certainly, I don’t in public. I never did reveal my feelings, and I cannot change my nature now.” She then added, “They say I don’t cry. They should see me when I am alone, or sometimes with my friends.”

The district attorney, however, had already decided to exploit Lizzie’s demeanor in the face of police questioning and make it a central theme of his case against her. Every police officer who spoke to her on that day was called to the stand and asked, among other things, to describe her demeanor. And, in his closing argument, he hit on the point numerous times, telling the jury that Lizzie was “cool to a degree of coolness that, whether she is guilty or innocent, has challenged the amazement of the world.” And, “There were few people in Fall River that kept their heads that day excepting the woman who now sits in the dock” when everyone else “was lost in excitement and wonder and amazement.” He did offer the qualifier that Lizzie’s “absence of tears” and her “icy demeanor may have either meant consciousness of guilt or consciousness of loss,” and he said he would not “urge that this woman, remarkable though she is, nervy as she is, brave as she is, cool as she is, should be condemned because of grief.” But then, he immediately did condemn her by adding that “other things”—the implication being it was a guilty conscience—“drove back the tears to their source and forbade her to show the emotions that belong to the sex.”

He continued in the same vein, alternating between what he felt was actual evidence and returning again to her demeanor. On discovering her father’s body, instead of running out into the streets “in abject terror,” as he assured the jury any one of them would do, she stayed “inside the screen door and calmly summoned her picked and chosen friends.” When she should have been frightened, she displayed nothing but a “calm and quiet demeanor.” Even into that evening, she displayed such “stoical nerve” that she was able to go alone into “dark and gloomy recesses” of her own cellar, where the bloody clothes of her slain parents lay in a pile. Knowlton then added that a “woman that has that absolute command of herself … tell me that she is physically incapable of this act.” Despite his brief acknowledgment  that people may react differently to shocking deaths, Knowlton did not hesitate to make his interpretation of Lizzie’s “icy demeanor” a core component of his case.

Subsequent observers of the case, like Edmund Pearson, writing in 1937, would do much the same regarding Lizzie’s manner. “It is to me an astonishment to hear people dogmatize upon the correct behavior of persons who are suspected of murder. If the suspect is calm, say these folk, it is a sign of guilt—or innocence. If he is agitated it is also proof of whatever the dogmatist likes to think … Not one of us knows how he or she would act if accused of murder, or how anyone else ‘ought’ to act.” He wrote those words, then in the very next paragraph found fault with Lizzie for her demeanor. “The one calm person at 92 second street [that morning] was Miss Lizzie Borden. There were no tears, no agitation, no sign of grief, fear or confusion.” This, he concluded, naturally produced in police officers “a state of incredulity.”   

Pearson was correct in that when the police encountered Lizzie, a woman they didn’t know, and compared her demeanor to their expectation of how they thought a generic Victorian-era woman should act, they were struck by what seemed to them a clear lack of distress appropriate to the situation. But was that the impression of the people who actually knew Lizzie? While the prosecution primarily asked only police officers about Lizzie’s demeanor, the defense took pains to ask her friends and others who personally knew her how they would describe her reaction to the discovery of the murders.

Did Lizzie Show Signs of Distress After the Murders?

Bridget Sullivan was the first to see Lizzie after Lizzie’s frantic call for help, and she testified that Lizzie “was more excited than I ever saw her before.” At the inquest, she would say Lizzie was crying at the time, at least according to the transcript read to her, but at the trial she denied ever seeing tears from Lizzie or even saying so. Fair enough, as no one else claimed to see Lizzie crying. But once Bridget ran off to fetch Alice Russell, what Mrs. Churchill saw out her window across the strip of yard between them, was Lizzie standing at the screen door of her house in such “great distress” that the neighbor opened her kitchen window to call over and ask Lizzie what was wrong. According to The Jennings Journals, Mrs. Churchill would later tell one of her boarders, “there was such a look on Lizzie’s face—such an awful look when she leaned up side of the door.” At the preliminary hearing she would say, Lizzie looked “as if she was distressed or frightened about something,” and that she stood with a hand to her head. At the trial she would describe Lizzie as seeming, “excited, as if something was the matter,” and she would again recall that Lizzie had been rubbing her head.

Lizzie, of course, had no idea that Mrs. Churchill was looking out her window at that exact moment, so it would be safe to say that Lizzie’s visible distress was not manufactured but a reflection of her genuine state of mind. Mrs. Churchill said by the time she made it over to the house, she found Lizzie sitting on the back stairs near the back door when she came in. They spoke briefly, Lizzie pouring out her fear that her father had an enemy, and how they’d thought they’d been poisoned. She also blurted her worry that Abby had been killed, too, “for I thought I heard her come in.” Then Mrs. Churchill left to try to get someone to summon a doctor. When she returned “no more than five minutes later,” Lizzie was still sitting where she’d left her. Apparently, she hadn’t moved as the shock was settling in.

By the time Alice Russell arrived, Lizzie was back on her feet, “leaning against the doorway between the back entry and the kitchen.” Alice described her as “very much overcome” as well as “dazed.” She told Lizzie she should sit down on the rocker in the kitchen. At the trial, she said Lizzie “sat down as if she was going to be faint, and I asked for a towel.” (She did not faint.) Alice spent the next little while bathing Lizzie’s face, rubbing her hands and fanning her along with Mrs. Churchill.

Charles Sawyer, another early arrival, didn’t know Lizzie but when asked at the inquest about Lizzie’s appearance, he replied that “she was apparently grief stricken, or something, although I might not be a judge in that respect … She seemed to be considerably excited and very uneasy, and the ladies seemed to be ministering to her, that is bathing her face.” The Jennings Journals, records Sawyer remembering that Lizzie was “very much broken up” when he arrived.

Not long after, Alice noted how warm it was in the kitchen, and suggested that Lizzie move to the dining room where it was cooler. Dr. Bowen recalled that Lizzie “threw herself onto the lounge” there, where she lay down and Alice continued to fan her. Mrs. Bowen showed up, and Dr. Bowen left to send a telegram to Emma. While he was out, Bridget and Mrs. Churchill went looking for Abby at Lizzie’s worried prodding and discovered Abby’s body upstairs. Sawyer would later tell Jennings that Lizzie “was very much surprised when told her mother was killed.” At the inquest he had put that more strongly, saying that he’d thought that when Lizzie learned Abby was murdered, too, that “she apparently went off into some kind of swoon or hysterical fit, I don’t know what, and Dr. Bowen said she’d better be carried up to her room.” That was surely an overstatement, no one else recalls such an exaggerated reaction, but it was reaction enough that once Dr. Bowen returned, he did soon tell Lizzie she should go up to her room.  

While upstairs in her room, Lizzie complained of a headache and feeling sick. Alice fetched Dr. Bowen, and he gave Lizzie some “bromo caffeine,” said to be the equivalent of aspirin, to help her feel better. Alice later testified that she and Lizzie’s friends decided they shouldn’t leave Lizzie alone. “We knew the state she was in; when one of us was out [of the room], the other made a point to be there.” Apparently, Lizzie was able to pull herself together when the police appeared before her to ask questions, although she couldn’t stop herself from telling Deputy Marshal Fleet that she hoped he would be quick with his search as the ordeal was making her feel sick. That evening, Dr. Bowen gave her morphine to calm her down and help her sleep.

It would seem her “state” did not much improve on Friday, the following day. Reporters lingering outside the house would note Dr. Bowen’s frequent trips across the street, allegedly to give Lizzie medical attention for her “nervous prostration.” That afternoon, The Fall River Herald reported that “Dr. Bowen calls upon her every hour or so,” and that it had been learned Lizzie was “in that dull and dangerous state of semi unconsciousness where she gives no sign of sorrow but simply lies motionless on her pillow with eyes closed.” Dr. Bowen later testified that on Friday evening he doubled her dose of morphine for nighttime use as, apparently, a single dose hadn’t done the trick. She would continue taking morphine each night, even as she was being taken each day by carriage to appear for questioning at the inquest. But morphine’s calming effects were not enough to relieve her upset when, at the end of the inquest, seven days after the murders, Lizzie was arrested. It was widely reported that as soon as a crying Emma left her at the jail, Lizzie began trembling and vomiting violently.

There is no doubt that the people close to Lizzie recognized she was in great distress throughout her ordeal. Still, she was able to find the wherewithal to speak to the authorities in a calm manner, an ability that was clearly to her detriment. While police were constructing a narrative of Lizzie as “icy” as any cold-blooded killer, her friends were telling reporters that they admired her ability to stand up under pressure as befitted a well-bred gentlewoman. Indeed, as Mrs. Susan Handy, wife of Dr. Handy, told the Fall River Evening News on August 10th, “Some have tried to make much ado about Lizzie’s remarkable composure. [But] this is her chief characteristic.”

Lizzie’s Demeanor Before the Murders

In the early days of the investigation, as the police were giving reporters their cynical take on what they considered to be Lizzie’s perverse demeanor after the murders, those who actually knew her were flocking to her defense, eager to tell reporters what they believed was a more accurate description of their friend.

“Her conduct since the murders has been just what anyone who knew her would expect,” said Lizzie’s staunch supporter, Mrs. Mary Brigham, to The Boston Post on August 20th. Lizzie, she added, “was a girl of very even temper. She never became excited.” On August 15th, the circle of church friends Lizzie would have soon joined in Marion at a vacation home had the murders not happened, also spoke about Lizzie’s calm demeanor in the face of stress to The Boston Globe. “A great deal is said about her coolness now. That’s exactly like her.” The friend went on to describe an accident that was serious enough to be reported in the newspaper in June of 1892, about a dumbwaiter filled with dishes that had fallen onto Lizzie’s arms and badly crushed them. “Instead of screaming or fainting or doing anything that any other woman but Lizzie Borden would done, she merely said in a low voice, ‘Will someone come here?’ Her arms were so bruised and lamed that a fortnight afterward she could not bear the shaking of hands, and yet she never complained.”

The Boston Post had clearly been apprised of the same incident, because on August 6th, only two days after the murders, the paper addressed other stories of Lizzie’s “stolid indifference” to the murders. The writer of the article said that Lizzie displayed “just so much of emotion as one might expect from the woman who allowed a dumbwaiter to crush her wrists rather than let fall the pan full of dishes she held, and said to the horrified bystanders: “You see, the dishes must have broken if I hadn’t kept my hold.”

Clearly, District Attorney Knowlton was not swayed by such stories, he was listening to the disapproving police officers who assumed Lizzie’s coolness to be indicative of guilt. Of course, police were giving Knowlton other compelling reasons to believe she’d killed Andrew and Abby, such as eyewitness testimony that she’d tried to buy prussic acid, a lethal poison, the day before the murders. And Lizzie had done herself no favors with her seemingly contradictory answers when Knowlton questioned her at the inquest. Still, from where Knowlton sat, Lizzie’s composure in the face of events was so inexplicable to him that he thought it could be a sign of insanity. He even tried to talk Andrew Jennings into allowing Lizzie to undergo examination by doctors in order to see if she qualified for such a diagnosis. When Jennings did not assent, Knowlton sent District Police Officer Moulton Batchelder out to see if he could find someone who might have seen signs of insanity in Lizzie or had knowledge of whether insanity ran in her family.

Batchelder didn’t speak to many who were actually close to Lizzie, it’s possible some may have refused to speak to him; rather, his report is full of people who were on the periphery of Lizzie’s life yet were longtime Fall River residents who had known the Borden and/or Morse families for decades (Lizzie’s real mother, Sarah, was a Morse). Not one of the people named in the report would say they knew Lizzie or any of her forebears to be insane, but almost to a person they said that either the family, or Lizzie herself, was “known to be peculiar” or “odd.” This peculiarity was not defined, but if they were talking about composure so unnatural-seeming that it often wins the admiration of friends while rattling outside observers, there is one possible explanation that would not have been understood in Lizzie’s time: autism.  

Could Autism Explain Lizzie’s “Coolness”?

Lizzie Borden was a woman who was known, both before and after the murders, for a composure that confounded so many who came in contact with her that she was frequently described as odd. Today, a person who demonstrates an unusual lack of expected emotion or signs of what is now called “a flat affect” would likely be considered for an evaluation for autism. If Lizzie sat somewhere on the autism spectrum, she would still have experienced strong emotions—like that “lamentation of the heart” that Harrington spoke of—but she also might have had a difficult time expressing her emotions outwardly or making them visible in the ways that “neurotypical” individuals might expect. Autism frequently leads to social misunderstandings, and today law enforcement officers are often taught how to recognize signs of autism spectrum disorder so as not to wrongfully suspect affected individuals of refusing to cooperate or otherwise thwart their investigations.  

While many have speculated on the possibility of Lizzie suffering from some kind of mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychopathy, to explain why she might suddenly rise up and butcher her parents, not many have thought to advance an autism hypothesis. After all, autism doesn’t typically cause a person to burst out of their room with a hatchet to kill half their family. Autism is much more likely to make the person hide in their room so as not to have to talk to anyone in their family at all (not so different than Lizzie). One usually sees the idea that Lizzie may have been autistic quietly suggested on message boards by people who have lived with autistic family members and recognize that Lizzie Borden often behaved in ways much like their own loved ones. These suggestions are usually shrugged off by the majority of people who think most autistic people are swaying children who don’t make eye contact and can’t make friends.

In reality, autism can present in numerous ways, subtle and not-so-subtle, and many adults who are diagnosed later in adulthood never suspected it as a reason for why most of their lives they felt themselves to be “different” than others. Autism is not at all an explanation for inexplicable murder, but it can be an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable demeanor of a person who strikes many around them as peculiar. That is the only reason it is brought up here and introduced as food for thought. For more on this possible explanation for Lizzie’s infamous demeanor, as well as for her infamously puzzling inquest testimony, see Autism Theory.

Author’s Take

While Knowlton had no problem using police officer impressions of Lizzie’s demeanor immediately after the murders as evidence she was cold-blooded enough to kill, I don’t see how anyone’s demeanor after a traumatic event can be taken as an indicator of guilt. Then again, neither do I see how it can point to innocence. Demeanor is independent of circumstance, shaped instead by the unique combination of someone’s chemical makeup, brain wiring, and personal history. We humans are not only terrible at predicting how any one person will act while under stress, we are also terrible at predicting how we ourselves will act. I will tell you how I know.

When I was 30 years old, just a bit younger than Lizzie Borden at the time her parents were hacked to death, I walked into my own mother’s house and found her dead body, lying on her bed, her face so covered in blood that I could not recognize her (like Andrew), and her hands strangely curled up into a fists (also like Andrew). No outsider had slipped in and killed her, she had killed herself, something she had tried to do several times in the past, only this time she succeeded. I called my two sisters before I called 9-1-1, and we stayed together in the house the rest of the afternoon, primarily because we had no choice; the police said we couldn’t leave until someone from the medical examiner’s office came to analyze the scene and gave them an official cause of death.

Each one of us sisters had different reactions to our mother’s self-murder. My middle sister sat on the floor, red-faced, tears streaming non-stop, barely speaking a word. She didn’t want to look at my mother’s body at all. My youngest sister cried a little but mostly resorted to sharp and bitter remarks between going in and out of the bedroom to put her hand on my mother’s dead arm. This upset me for reasons I still don’t understand, and I stood in the doorway to yell at her, “What are you doing in there! Get out of there!” My eyes were dry the entire time, I didn’t cry; instead, I paced around, cracked gallows humor jokes and sometimes became possessed by fits of inappropriate laughter. One unexpectedly dead mother, three different sisters, three dramatically different ways of responding.

But it was my admittedly inappropriate demeanor that seemed to strike the police officers as most suspicious, because they kept pulling me aside to question me—again and again. I remember laughing at one officer’s question and saying, “You think I killed her!” I felt so flung out of my normal experience that I barely recognized myself. I can’t imagine how much more disorienting and confusing it would have been if we had believed our mother had been killed by a stranger.

I will admit that my personal experience on that horrible day colors how I look at Lizzie Borden and what she did and didn’t do on her own horrible day. If she was as innocent as I was, then I have profound sympathy for what she went through in the hours and days after discovering her father’s blood-covered body. I will also admit to another personal reason I have difficulty judging Lizzie’s demeanor after the murders, as described by police officers, to be an indication of guilt.

I am someone who has lived with autistic people literally my entire life (my father, my ex-husband, my oldest child), and I see in Lizzie many signs of what looks to me like autism. I am continually having to defend the seemingly illogical reactions and “flat effect” of my autistic loved ones to others. Of course, even if Lizzie was on the autism spectrum, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t guilty. I am only pointing out there could be reasons other than guilt for the mystifying coolness that so spooked Officer Harrington and often stood out to many others who spent time observing Lizzie.

Whether my personal experiences give me greater clarity about Lizzie Borden and her perplexing behavior or whether my experiences blind me to the implications of that behavior, I cannot say. What I can say is that while there are a number of compelling reasons to suspect that Lizzie might be guilty of killing Andrew and Abby, her demeanor after the murders is not one of them for me.