Alice Russell Biography

After the death of Alice’s father in 1878, she and her mother moved into a house next door to the Bordens (later known as the Kelly house). It was there that she became friends with the Borden sisters, with Alice being closest to Emma in age and temperament. Yet, Alice shared with Lizzie a mutual devotion to the Central Congregational Church. A Borden family friend who knew them both, Henry Wells, recalled frequently seeing Lizzie and Alice and their friend Elizabeth Johnston walk to church together. The women often “called on” each other at their respective homes even after Alice moved around the corner to Borden Street in 1891.

Because of her close relationship with the sisters, Alice was a confidante who probably knew more than most about the family. She also offered to stay with Emma and Lizzie in the days following the murders to help them deal with the upsetting aftermath. Alice ended up being part of several of the events that unfolded before and after the murders and would later come up at Lizzie’s trial. She would thus become one of the most important witnesses for the prosecution; she was certainly the one who did Lizzie the most damage. Although, because she only told the truth of what she remembered, the harm to Lizzie as defendant was done through no fault of Alice’s own.

Still, she was not a sympathetic character in newspaper reports at the time. Elizabeth Jordan of The New York World provided a typical description of Alice at trial:

“The witness herself was a person of such singular individuality that she seemed typical of all the uncanny features of this amazing mystery as well as of the strange people and their strange and narrow lives who are the actors in it … Today she took the witness-stand and not only testified to what will come nearer to putting a rope around her girlfriend’s neck than anything yet brought out, but she did it with a vicious snap in her voice and a cruel compression of her thin, colorless lips, which suggested anything but sorrow for the fact that she was compelled to do so.

The personal appearance of Miss Russell is extraordinary … Tall and slender and thin and sharp of feature, with a sallow complexion; yellowish gray hair, brushed tightly back into a coil like that worn by Lizzie Borden; a flat sailor-like hat, with a narrow rim; a face that is cold, matter-of-fact and non-sympathetic.”

So why was Alice Russell’s time on the stand so helpful to the prosecution’s case against Lizzie? What did she know that was so damaging? The trouble began the day before the murders.

A Dark Prophecy

On the night of Tuesday, August 3rd, Andrew and Abby and Lizzie came down with a vomiting sickness so unpleasant that it caused both Abby and Lizzie to suspect they could have been poisoned. The next morning, Lizzie told her father and stepmother she was still feeling unwell, and, later, she and Abby both told others she had spent the day resting in her room. (Another witness for the prosecution, Eli Bence, would say differently, testifying at the preliminary hearing that he and two other men saw Lizzie in his drug store Wednesday morning, where she asked to buy prussic acid, a form of cyanide.) That evening, she left the house to go visit Alice Russell.

According to Alice, Lizzie described herself as depressed. She spoke about her fears that someone was trying to poison the family and her worry that her father had an enemy, along with her dread that something terrible was going to happen. “I feel as if I wanted to sleep with my eyes half open—with one eye open half the time—for fear they will burn the house down over us.” And “I am afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what somebody will do something.”

Of course, the next morning someone did do something; an enemy of Andrew brutally murdered him and his wife with a hatchet. The fact that Lizzie was predicting such a thing the night before made it appear afterward that she was the enemy who was plotting to kill her father and stepmother. The prosecution concluded that she was trying to make it seem like someone else was intent on doing away with her parents to pre-emptively throw suspicion off herself, which would have been an ironic gambit, as it only made more suspicion fall on her. But whether Lizzie was guilty or innocent, the timing was inarguably uncanny.

For a closer look at exactly what Lizzie told Alice, and her reasons why, see Prophecy.

Lizzie Burns a Dress

Alice stayed at the Borden House with Emma and Lizzie on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, supporting them throughout their ordeal. As Bridget Sullivan had already left the house for good, Alice helped out by cooking breakfast on Sunday morning for herself, Emma, Lizzie, and John Morse. She left Emma to wash the dishes and went upstairs to straighten her room. When she came downstairs again, she saw Emma still at the sink and saw Lizzie near the stove with a skirt in hand, starting to tear it into strips. Alice said she heard Emma ask her what she was going to do, and Lizzie said she was going to burn up the dress because it was stained with paint. (Emma told a slightly different version.) Lizzie then held up the hem of the skirt to show Alice the paint stains. Still, this made Alice nervous enough that she told Lizzie, “I wouldn’t let anyone see you doing that.” She turned and left the room without waiting to see if Lizzie actually fed the strips of the dress into the fire.

Alice would later say that was all there was to it, but the next day, when the private detective hired by the Borden sisters asked Alice if all the dresses Lizzie owned were still in the house, Alice first said yes. But she shortly had an attack of conscience and told the sisters she had told a falsehood and that burning that dress was the worst thing Lizzie could have done. Lizzie then cried, “Then why did you let me do it?” The sisters urged Alice to go back to the private detective and tell the truth, which she did. However, she did not volunteer the information to the police or to the district attorney when she was questioned at the inquest before Lizzie’s arrest, and the subject more or less drifted away, at least for the next several months.

For a more in-depth look at the dress-burning incident and the differences in Alice and Emma’s testimony, see Bedford Cord.

Alice’s Inquest Testimony

Because Alice was present in the house after the murders, she was summoned to the inquest that took place the week after the murders. Although she didn’t reveal the dress-burning at that time, she was forthcoming about what she knew about the dynamics of the Borden family. She explained why Lizzie was not fond of her stepmother, making it clear that Lizzie didn’t believe Abby advocated for her and Emma with Andrew like a real mother would.

Alice also shared that she “observed” Emma and Lizzie “would have liked to have been cultured girls,” the implication being they would have liked to enjoy a grander lifestyle. Yet their father, “plain-living” Andrew, set in his ways, didn’t see why this longing would be important to them. Alice added that the sisters complained about that on occasion, “they didn’t see why things couldn’t be different.” She added that she found their feelings to be completely “natural,” and that it “would be unnatural if they did not.”  

While much of what Alice said at this proceeding didn’t come out in trial (the prosecution chose to lean into the family conflict over Andrew’s gift of property to Abby as indicative of Lizzie’s supposed animosity toward Abby), her words have been used in the decades since to paint Lizzie as intensely discontented with her life as Andrew’s daughter. Later authors frequently quote Alice’s inquest testimony to portray Lizzie as so miserable at 92 Second Street, and so desperate for a house on The Hill, that she decided to smash a hatchet into his face. Of course, Alice didn’t offer insights with any intention to paint such a grim picture; again, she thought it only natural for Emma and Lizzie to want a bigger house—first, because they knew their father could afford it, but also, who among us wouldn’t want to move to a bigger house if we could?

For the next several months, Alice visited Lizzie in jail, sometimes arriving with their friend Elizabeth Johnston to give Lizzie things to read to pass the time. But then came November and a summons for Alice to appear before the grand jury.

Alice at the Grand Jury

The authors of Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie Borden and Her Fall River, the masterwork by the curators of the Fall River Historical Society, explained what happened when Alice first appeared in the courtroom.

“When the Grand Jury of Bristol County session began, Alice was called to testify at these closed proceedings and again remained silent concerning the dress incident. But subsequent to Alice’s testifying before the Grand Jury in November 1892, she “became troubled in her mind for the oath that she would be obliged to take [which] required her to ‘tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’” Consulting with a “senior member of a leading law firm on Bedford street, [Marcus G.B. Swift, partners with George Grime in the firm Swift & Grime at 29 Bedford Street, she] took him into her confidence,” telling him that there were “some things which she had forgotten while on the stand.” Soon after, a “member of the law firm went up to the telephone exchange and called up the district attorney,” notifying him that “Miss Russell desired to be recalled as a witness when the jury reconvened” on December 1; she was granted that privilege. Later summoned as a witness at the Borden trial, she again revealed the story of the burned dress she had told during her second testimony before the Grand Jury, “thus relieving her own conscience.”

Shortly after hearing Alice’s tale, the grand jury, who had been mulling over their decision through a pause in the proceedings, voted 20-1 to indict Lizzie Borden on the charge of murder. We don’t know if they would have indicted her anyway, but the timing made it appear as if Alice’s testimony pushed them in that direction.

The End of a Friendship

Most assume that Alice came to believe Lizzie to be guilty of the murders, and that is why she decided to testify about the dress-burning as well as why their friendship abruptly ended. This assumption is supported by a story that appeared in the September 2002 issue of The Fall River Historical Society Report. According to the report, Alice had told her cousin, Ida Russell Minor, that she thought Lizzie Borden was innocent of the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Borden until “she saw her burn the dress in the kitchen stove. From the day of that observation until she breathed her last, she was convinced of Lizzie Borden’s guilt.”

However, this hearsay assertion by a descendant of Alice’s cousin doesn’t hold together. If it was true the dress-burning convinced Alice of Lizzie’s guilt on that day, only three days after the murders, then why would she not only fail to mention the incident to authorities for as long as she did, but still continue to visit Lizzie in jail for months afterward? If the assertion were true, it would mean Alice was purposely concealing evidence in a murder investigation and only pretending to support Lizzie all that time. This is highly doubtful. It also seems doubtful that church-going Alice would harbor serious suspicions about Lizzie’s guilt when the pastors that led her church were publicly avowing Lizzie’s innocence and showing up in court to support her. If she actually had reason to believe Lizzie guilty, wouldn’t she share that with her pastors if for no other reason than to save them from tarnishing their reputations as godly men by taking a stand for a murderer?

Furthermore, Edward Radin quoted Alice Russell in an interview she gave to the Fall River Evening News, soon after her testimony in the 1893 jury trial. “Neither by anything I heard in the Borden house before or after the murders,” said Alice, “was I ever made to believe that Lizzie committed the murders. I don’t believe in her guilt now.”

If that was indeed said by Alice to reporters (the one microfiche archive known to exist of the Fall River Evening News was unavailable at the time of this writing), it seems just as likely that either the friendship couldn’t bear the strain of such dramatic events and ended by mutual decision, or Lizzie herself chose to end it because Alice was actively helping the district attorney to prosecute her, and Lizzie no longer felt her friend was safe to trust.

After the Trial

Yet, whatever the sentiment swirling around her, Alice Russell carried on, not unlike her former friend Lizzie did in the midst of her own swirl of disapproval after the trial. And, like Lizzie, she made it a point to never again speak about the murders, at least not to anyone that was willing to share or keep any record of it. She would soon live again with her mother, and she continued to work, teaching the young ladies of Fall River to sew for the next 20 years. When she retired from the school district in 1913, she received one of the first pensions in Fall River’s newly instituted schoolteacher pension program.

By 1930, she could no longer manage on her own and moved into the Home for Aged People on Highland Avenue, where she remained in residence until her death at 89 in January 1941. Mrs. Florence Cook Brigham, a curator of the Fall River Historical Society to whom Alice taught sewing when she was in high school, fondly remembered her as “a gentle person” with “lovely white hair” and believed that she “would not have told the story about the burning of the dress if her conscience hadn’t bothered her.”

It wasn’t until 2002 that the only photograph of Alice Russell known to exist surfaced when it was donated to the Fall River Historical Society. Taken in 1931 by the husband of Alice’s cousin, Ida, it reveals 79-year-old Alice in her room at the old folks’ home. It was found by the donor among a collection of family photographs and inscribed, “Alice Maria Russell, Fall River, Sept. 4, 1931.” Written on the envelope in which it was found were the words, “Alice Russell, Lizzie’s Turncoat Friend.”