Dress Lizzie Wore That Morning

There are few subjects in the Borden murder case that inspire as much conjecture and debate as the dress (or two or three) that Lizzie may or may not have worn the day her parents were gruesomely butchered. As Borden scholar Eugene Hosey observed in The Hatchet, “There is something endlessly fascinating about Lizzie’s attire. Perhaps it is the image of the feminine Victorian dress, bloodied by a monstrous act, that conjures feelings too creepy to ever quite shake. Apart from the weapon (successfully cleansed or missing), the circumstances surrounding Lizzie Borden’s dress of August 4th, 1892, are possibly the most controversial and divisive of the Borden case debates.”

Searches of Lizzie’s room and various closets and trunks yielded no other good candidates, or at least no other dress with telltale blood. Without solid blood evidence to connect Lizzie to the crime, prosecutor Hosea Knowlton despaired privately in letters to Massachusetts Attorney General Albert Pillsbury that he didn’t think he could get a grand jury to indict her, let alone win a conviction at a trial. Then Alice Russell helped him out with her belated tale of Lizzie burning her Bedford Cord dress three days after the murders. The indictment came immediately. Never mind that none of the witnesses described Lizzie wearing the faded, paint-stained Bedford Cord on the morning of the murders (and Alice Russell expressly said it was not). Who needed blood when you had such potent ashes?

During the trial, the prosecution created so much confusion over the simple question of the dress that Lizzie wore before a dozen witnesses, along with the dress she burned, that the cloud of suspicion it cast over Lizzie persisted long after her acquittal, and it has only grown thicker over the years. While other entries in this encyclopedia on the Bengaline Silk and the Bedford Cord examine the subject of her dresses in greater depth, it is worth looking at the subject and its attendant intrigue from a different angle.  

How Many Dresses?

In a time where one could not buy ready-made dresses at the department store, Lizzie had her dresses custom-made by a seamstress who would come to 92 Second Street for several weeks and begin sewing away. Lizzie, of course, knew how to sew and would help in the endeavor. In the decade before the murders, that seamstress was Mary Raymond, who also made Abby Borden’s dresses (although not Emma’s for reasons not stated). Mrs. Raymond was called to the stand during the jury trial to describe her three-week stay with the Bordens in May of 1892, a few months before the killings. She testified that during that visit she made dresses both for Abby and Lizzie, and they all three worked together in the guest room sewing new dresses for each. Emma would testify that she assisted, “as I always do.” The Bedford Cord was made during this visit (and was stained with paint while Mrs. Raymond was still there), as was the pink striped wrapper that Lizzie changed into on August 4th, an hour after the murders were discovered.

Deputy Marshal Fleet and State Detective Seaver, the police officers who searched the clothes press and examined all the dresses during the main search of the house on Saturday, weren’t quite sure how many dresses they found in the closet, but Seaver estimated the number to be 12 to 15. Emma eventually made an inventory, prepared a week before the trial, of all the dresses she believed were inside that closet on the afternoon of the search, and handed the list to Jennings from the stand.

Q: Can you tell us about how many?

A: About eighteen or nineteen.

Q: And whose were those dresses?

A: All of them belonged to my sister and I except one that belonged to Mrs. Borden.

Q: How many of those dresses were blue dresses or dresses in which blue was a marked color?

A: Ten.

Q: To whom did those belong?

A: Two of them to me and eight to my sister.

There is a discrepancy between Officer Seaver’s estimate of how many dresses they examined (12 to 15) and what Emma claimed was in the clothes press (18 or 19), although it is not clear whether Seaver was counting the heavy silks in the corner they chose not to take off the nail to examine. This difference, however small, does give us reason to ask if there were dresses “missing” during the search, dresses that Lizzie might have hidden somewhere due to telltale blood spatters. Seaver said he did make an inventory of the dresses at the time of the search, but testified, “Unfortunately I mislaid it or lost it, so I haven’t seen it since I was at Fall River at the time the [preliminary] hearing was.” He added he’d thought he kept the notebook in which he recorded the inventory in his coat pocket, but when he went to look for that notebook, he couldn’t find it. So we have no idea as to the accuracy of Seaver’s estimate of the number of dresses they inspected. And, under Robinson’s cross, he said he couldn’t remember anything about the colors of the dresses he inspected, not even if any of them were blue.

At the trial, Emma would testify that one of the dresses hanging in that closet on the afternoon of the search was the Bedford Cord that Mrs. Raymond had made for Lizzie three months earlier. That dress was almost immediately stained with paint, but Emma testified that Lizzie continued to wear it anyway, “as a morning dress only.” Still, that dress quickly started to fade, with Mary Raymond affirming from the stand that “it either faded or the color wore off, I can’t tell you which, it changed color.” Emma also said that dress became “very dirty, very much soiled, and badly faded,” and that Lizzie stopped wearing it about four to six weeks before Emma left for Fairhaven.

Emma also said that on the evening after the funeral of their father and stepmother—after police had searched the clothes press—that she saw the Bedford Cord hanging in there and then asked Lizzie, “You have not destroyed that old dress yet; why don’t you?” But despite Emma’s claim that she saw that particular light-blue dress, the police officers who conducted the search denied seeing it, or at least denied seeing a dress stained with paint. This paint-stained dress is the one that Lizzie would burn the next morning, and when this was discovered, it sent up all kinds of red flags for the prosecution. Since Fleet and Seaver hadn’t noticed it, that meant Lizzie must have hidden it. And the only reason to hide it, then to burn it, would be because there was telltale blood on it.

Was the Bedford Cord “The” Dress?

Knowlton, in his closing, strongly argued that the Bedford Cord was actually the dress Lizzie was wearing in the hour after Andrew was murdered. At least two witnesses, Adelaide Churchill and Officer Doherty, remembered Lizzie wearing a light blue dress, and the Bedford Cord was light blue. Mrs. Churchill, who stood over Lizzie and fanned her as she sat in the dining room, also remembered a “deep navy blue diamond” figure on the dress Lizzie wore, and that the figure was “printed all over the goods.” This shape seems not so very different from the figure Emma would recall as part of the Bedford Cord.

In Emma’s words: “It was a blue cotton Bedford cord, very light blue ground with a darker figure about an inch long and I think about three quarters of an inch wide.” When asked to further describe the figure, she answered, “It was pointed at the top and broader at the bottom than it was at the top … I think one part of it was black or very dark blue and the other part a very light blue.” She agreed that it was somewhat “triangular” in shape. A figure that struck Mrs. Churchill as a diamond shape could possibly match the figure Emma described as “pointed at the top.” Although the description given by Doherty, the only other witness to claim Lizzie was wearing a light blue dress, called the figure “a little spot.” And of course, Mrs. Bowen recalled Lizzie wearing a different shade of blue altogether, a dress with a “dark blue” ground, with a white figure.

Still, it does seem the prosecution was hopeful for some indication that Lizzie had been wearing the Bedford Cord, so they could make good their claim she had been destroying evidence by burning it. Knowlton repeatedly asked Mrs. Raymond if she thought that once the dress had faded and “the color changed” that it could be described as a “drab” color, which was the word used by Dr. Bowen to describe the dress he remembered Lizzie wearing when he arrived in the minutes after the murders. But Mrs. Raymond would not accept that description.

Regardless, it is almost certain the Bedford Cord was not the dress Lizzie was wearing the hour after Andrew’s murder. First, no one mentioned seeing paint stains on that dress, not even Mrs. Churchill. And Alice Russell, who claimed to have seen Lizzie in the Bedford Cord soon after it was made, testified she hadn’t seen it again until the day she saw Lizzie burn it.

When Lizzie was asked at the inquest what she was wearing at the time of her father’s murder, she answered, “I had on a navy blue, sort of a Bengaline or India silk skirt, with a navy blue blouse.” Indeed, she had given just such a navy blue skirt and blouse to her lawyer to hand over to the police. The authorities ultimately came to doubt that was the dress she was actually wearing; after all, Churchill and Doherty said she was wearing light blue. Yet all were in agreement about the dress she wore next: A pink wrapper.

Why Did Lizzie Change into a Pink Wrapper?

Sometime around noon, as the house was filling with more police officers and doctors getting their investigation underway, Dr. Bowen testified that he told an upset Lizzie she should go up to her room, away from all the activity. One of the first things she did was change out of the dress she had been wearing and put on the Pink Wrapper that Mrs. Raymond had also made for her several months earlier. Alice Russell recalled following Lizzie upstairs, going back down for a bit, then returning to Lizzie’s bedroom to find Lizzie emerging from Emma’s room in a pink striped wrapper, in the midst of tying a red ribbon at the waist of the dress. At the inquest, Lizzie said she did this because, “They thought I had better change it,” while never specifying who “they” were. Knowlton didn’t follow up to learn who Lizzie was referring to, and there is no record of anyone being asked if they had encouraged her to change her clothes besides Alice Russell, who said it wasn’t she. Perhaps Lizzie was interpreting Dr. Bowen’s advice to go up to her room as advice to put on something more comfortable; a “wrapper” may have been a more comfortable choice in which to lie down. Although, when Alice was asked if she knew why Lizzie changed, she didn’t say anything about comfort, she said that with so many people about and wanting to talk to her, “I suppose she wanted to get into a respectable appearance.”

Still, Lizzie’s reference to a mysterious, unproven “they” causes many to suspect Lizzie was in a hurry to hide evidence, however subtle, of blood spatter. The fact that no one is on record as having seen exactly where she put the dress she removed was also suspicious. Where did that dress go? Alice said she’d first gone upstairs with Lizzie, but once there, Lizzie told her that when it came time for an undertaker, “I want Winward.” Alice then went downstairs to convey that information to Dr. Bowen. It was during that time that Lizzie stepped into Emma’s room to change. Many interpret that as Lizzie making up a flimsy excuse to send Alice out of the room so she could change unseen and spirit away the dress she’d been wearing. Of course, if she hid that dress, and she also hid the Bedford Cord many believe she was wearing to kill Abby (or else why else burn it?), that means she had not one but two dresses to hide.

A lot of this speculation is questionable. Lizzie had just spent a good 45 minutes in full view of more than a dozen people, and she didn’t spend those 45 minutes backed into a corner. She stood at the screen, sat on the back stairs, moved into the kitchen, got up and walked into the dining room, even lay down on the lounge there, giving everyone a good view of the bottom of her dress and her feet. She wasn’t making evasive maneuvers to keep any part of her dress out of sight. And just because no one bothered to keep track of where she put the dress she removed is not proof she hid it. She would have had precious little time to do so, anyway, as when Alice was asked if Lizzie had changed her shoes and stockings, too, she said she didn’t believe so because, in her words, “I was not out of the room long enough.” And, for the rest of the day, Lizzie was never alone in that room; Alice testified that the friends and supporters who arrived to comfort Lizzie believed her so distressed by the murders that they made an agreement that there would always be someone else in the room with her. “We knew the state she was in; when one of us was out [of the room], the other made a point to be there.”

Also questionable is Knowlton’s early effort to track down a dress pattern that Lizzie said she bought in New Bedford two weeks before the murders. It seems either he, or someone on the police force, had entertained the theory that Lizzie bought the pattern in order to quickly make a dress that she could then easily get rid of, and there was a lot of searching directed at finding this pattern, which was eventually located, unused, in a trunk in the attic, where Lizzie had said it was. This shows us what a thorn in his side the lack of blood evidence on any of Lizzie’s clothing was to him. That authorities even considered that Lizzie could have plotted to make a disposable dress in anticipation of drenching herself in blood seems a bizarre stretch and betrays how frantic they were to fill the gaping hole in their evidence against her.

Author’s Take

It sometimes amuses me, all the confusion and turmoil created over Lizzie’s dresses, when it would have been easy enough to sort out if the first police officers on the scene had made more careful observations. Or, if Detective Seaver hadn’t lost his inventory of the dresses in the clothes press he examined. Or, if other witnesses who saw Lizzie at the time had agreed on what dress they’d seen her wearing. Or, if Knowlton hadn’t contradicted common sense and his own witness by insisting Lizzie had been wearing the Bedford Cord immediately after Andrew’s murder, when clearly she wasn’t. But none of that happened.

Armchair sleuths abhor a vacuum, and into the informational void has spilled endless conjecture. Maybe she stuffed a bloodied dress or two under floorboards, or inside of walls, or under a pillow on the lounge where she sat watching as clueless officers searched her room. Maybe she shielded her dress from blood with an apron, or a gossamer she could wash off, or her father’s Prince Albert Coat worn backwards. Or, everyone’s favorite theory, maybe she stripped down and hacked at her parents’ heads while nude!

If the police decided not to accept the Bengaline Silk that Lizzie gave them as the “right” dress, then why not take basic measures to nail down to their satisfaction exactly what she was wearing? They had so many witnesses to work with, as well as such easy access to her closet in the days after the murders, they could have pursued the issue further, perhaps escorted Mrs. Churchill over to the house to look in the clothes press to see if she could identify the dress she remembered. Instead, they indulged in cynical speculation and left Lizzie sitting exposed under an eye of suspicion that she may not have deserved.

In his closing, Robinson made a great verbal show over the absurdity of the prosecution’s theory about her dresses, taking it to its illogical conclusions. He wondered aloud if Knowlton believed Lizzie had killed Abby in one dress, then taken it off, then put it back on to kill Andrew, then took it off again? Or, were they saying she put on a second garment, “dressing herself for the second slaughter?” Was there only one dress, or were there two that needed burning? It was all, he said, too “horrible to contemplate. And yet the government is driven to that extremity in its theory about the case.”

Even Judge Dewey, in his charge to the jury, seemed exasperated by trying to keep up with all the different descriptions from witnesses about what they saw Lizzie wearing. “Can you, gentlemen, extract from that testimony such a description of a dress as would enable you from the testimony to identify the dress? … Is there such an agreement in their accounts and in their memory and recollection that they had in that time of confusion and excitement, that you could put their statements together and from those statements say that any given dress was accurately described?”

After doing deep dives into courtroom transcripts and other documents regarding the Bengaline Silk and the Bedford Cord, and working logically through them, I have come to believe the convoluted issue of the dress(es) Lizzie wore the morning of August 4th is mostly sound and fury signifying nothing. If Lizzie Borden truly committed the murders, the opportunity to find blood evidence on her clothing is long gone, and while diving into the roiling waters of speculation about which dress she wore when and how she may have hidden them can be absorbing (I’ve done it plenty), it doesn’t really solve the problem of a lack of hard evidence against her. In the end, I think Governor Robinson is probably right, and the most “common sense” solution to the tangle of intrigue the prosecution created about the dresses is that there was no intrigue on Lizzie’s part at all, and the reason there was no blood to be found on her clothing is because she never picked up that hatchet.