Friends and Supporters

In the days and weeks after Andrew and Abby Borden were discovered murdered, it was only the police officers and journalists who didn’t know Lizzie personally that were quick to believe her guilty of the crime. Most everyone who actually knew her believed in her innocence and supported her through her ordeal. The following is a partial list of those most historically impactful. (Those with names underlined have a biography entry of their own.) 

Friends and Supporters

• Alice Russell — A longtime friend of both Emma and Lizzie, perhaps their closest friend in 1892, Alice Russell was a seamstress who had lived next door to the Bordens (in the Kelly House) for over a decade before moving around the corner. Unmarried like the Borden sisters, Lizzie and Alice became, in Alice’s words, “intimate friends,” and they often visited each other at their homes. It was Alice who Lizzie visited the night before the murders and spoke aloud her dark fears of being poisoned. She further predicted that something terrible was going to happen to her father. It was also Alice who Lizzie asked Bridget to fetch to be with her in the chaotic minutes after the murders.
• Alice was such a good friend that she stayed in the house with Emma and Lizzie for the four stressful days after the murders. Which was why she was present in the house when Lizzie burned her paint-stained Bedford Cord dress several days after the murders. While Alice didn’t feel compelled to tell the police what she saw at the inquest or preliminary hearing, by the time the grand jury heard evidence against Lizzie, Alice decided to be forthcoming. She was then labeled by the press as “Lizzie’s Turncoat Friend,” and the once close friendship between Alice and the Borden sisters came to an end. Alice was one of the star witnesses for the prosecution.
• Dr. Seabury Bowen — As the Borden family physician, neighbor and friend, Dr. Bowen was the first person Lizzie sent for after discovering her father motionless and bleeding on the sofa. It was Dr. Bowen who assured Lizzie that Andrew was dead. He was the one who Lizzie asked to send a telegram to Emma telling her to come home, and he was the one who showed police and all those who came after the bodies of the victims. He did his doctorly duty by sending Lizzie upstairs when she seemed overwhelmed, and he gave her medication to calm her nerves. He visited her frequently during the week after the murders, prescribing her nightly doses of morphine. Dr. Bowen was a staunch defender of Lizzie’s innocence to the press, and although he was a witness for the prosecution, he simply stuck to the facts and would not cooperate with any courtroom attempt to get him to imply that Lizzie was guilty.
• Phoebe Bowen — Dr. Bowen’s wife and friend of the family, Mrs. Bowen was particularly close to Abby Borden and visited the Borden house frequently, having stopped by just the evening before. Mrs. Bowen did step into the house in the hour after the murders and briefly attended to Lizzie but was so overwhelmed by events that her husband sent her home. She was a witness for the defense, primarily to identify the Bengaline Silk dress that Lizzie turned over to police as the dress that Lizzie actually wore.
• Mary Brigham — A childhood friend of Lizzie’s who had remained close to her in adulthood, Mrs. Mary Ella Brigham arrived at the Borden House less than two hours after the murders to offer sympathy and support to Lizzie. She was present when Assistant Marshal Fleet interviewed Lizzie for the second time and searched her room. She visited Lizzie each day at home after the murders and accompanied her to the inquest to offer her moral support. She was there with Emma and Lizzie at the police station when Lizzie was arrested. (Lizzie had been a great comfort to Mrs. Brigham the year before when her infant son had died.) Mrs. Brigham often sat beside Lizzie in courtroom proceedings when she was allowed. She was also called as a witness for the defense to help discredit testimony of prosecution witness Hannah Reagan. After Lizzie was acquitted, Mrs. Brigham remained friends with Lizzie, but eventually the social cost of being friendly with the town pariah became too much, or so said her future daughter-in-law, Florence Brigham. Mary Brigham cut ties with Lizzie around the same time that Lizzie and Emma became estranged.
• Mary Anna Holmes — The Holmes family and the Borden family had long been friendly, moving in the same circle in Fall River, but it wasn’t until Lizzie became active in the Central Congregational Church that she became especially friendly with Charles and Mary Anna Holmes (a.k.a. Mariana Holmes), both of whom were twenty-five years older than Lizzie. Clearly impressed with Lizzie’s volunteer work for the church and other charitable organizations, Mrs. Holmes recruited her to serve with her on the hospital board. She visited Lizzie each day after the murders and before her arrest to offer support. It was Mrs. Holmes who accompanied Lizzie to view her father in his casket before his funeral, and she testified in court that a grieving Lizzie had leaned over to press a tearful kiss to her father’s face. Mrs. Holmes also regularly visited Lizzie in jail when she was being held in Fall River. She was a defense witness at trial, speaking to Lizzie’s character as well as to help discredit the testimony of Hannah Regan.
• Charles Holmes — A longtime family friend of the Bordens, Charles Holmes was a deacon at the Congregational church, and an admirer of Lizzie for the tireless work she did there. He showed up to defend her at the police station when the Fall River Globe reported a false story, provided by jail matron Hannah Reagan, about Lizzie’s supposed “confession.” He was also often present near Lizzie during the trial, offering his support. It was to the Holmes’ residence that Lizzie went first at the conclusion of her trial to celebrate her acquittal. Although the couple stayed close to Lizzie for several years after the trial, when church members persisted in shunning Lizzie, their friendship eventually dissolved.
• Dr. Benjamin Handy — Both Benjamin Handy and his wife Susan had been family friends with the Bordens for years and were frequent visitors to their house, according to Mrs. Handy. Their daughter was part of Lizzie’s tight circle of friends, and it was to Dr. Handy’s cottage by the sea in Marion that Lizzie had planned to spend time the following Monday. It was also, ironically Dr. Handy, who drove by the Borden house in his carriage on the morning of the murders and saw a suspicious pale man loitering outside the Borden House. Although police never located a man that Handy could identify as the one he saw, he would always be certain this man had something to do with the murders. He and his wife also consistently defended Lizzie as innocent to reporters.
• Elizabeth Johnston — A schoolteacher two years older than Lizzie, Elizabeth Johnston was part of Lizzie’s church circle of unmarried female friends. She was one of the ladies who had gone to Marion to vacation in Dr. Handy’s cabin that August, and it was to Elizabeth that Lizzie wrote just before the murders informing her that she planned to join them the following Monday. That letter became the subject of much speculation, and the police tried to persuade Elizabeth to hand it over to them. But, with the backing of Andrew Jennings, she refused to share the contents and continued to vociferously defend Lizzie to reporters. Elizabeth and Alice Russell were said to be particularly close to Lizzie through their mutual church work, and the two women would regularly visit Lizzie in the early months of her imprisonment. However, after both women testified for the grand jury in November, their friendship with Lizzie ended and the visits stopped. Most assume the two women belatedly concluded that Lizzie was guilty, and that could be true; however, neither woman ever publicly spoke out against Lizzie, so the actual reason their visits stopped remains unknown.
• Augusta Tripp — Formerly Augusta Pool, Mrs. Augusta Tripp was a childhood friend of Lizzie’s who, along with her mother and sister, remained close to Lizzie well into their adulthood. Even after Augusta married and moved away to Westport and started a family, the two women made it a point to spend time together once a year in the summer, trading visits back and forth. Two weeks before the murders, Lizzie had traveled to New Bedford to stay five days with Augusta’s mother, Nancy Pool, and sister, Carrie, and the group squeezed in a trip to Westport to see Augusta. Officer Medley paid a visit to Augusta, and she told him it was her impression that Lizzie believed Abby to be deceitful and two-faced, “one thing to her face and another behind her back.” This prompted the district attorney to summon Augusta to appear at the inquest, and although Augusta said she never heard Lizzie say anything that was outright negative about her stepmother, her testimony about her “impression” helped spur the prosecution to decide on hatred as the motive for the murders.

Clergy

• Reverend Edwin Buck — A pastor and “city missionary” at the Central Congregational Church where Lizzie was such a dedicated volunteer, the 68-year-old Rev. Buck was one of Lizzie’s most steadfast defenders and supporters. He got to know her while she assisted him in teaching immigrant children at his Mission School and came to admire her to the point that he said he could not possibly doubt her innocence. He showed up at the Borden house within an hour of the murders and spent several hours with Lizzie that day. He continued visiting with her, praying with her and giving her spiritual counsel throughout her ordeal, from arrest through acquittal. He was frequently at her side during the trial. He also became close to Lizzie’s sister, Emma, who would later call him her “best friend in the world.” She would claim it was Reverend Buck who, before his death in 1903, advised her to move out of the house she shared with Lizzie, a choice that precipitated a permanent estrangement from her sister.      
• Reverend William Walker Jubb — Because Reverend Jubb had become a pastor at the Congregational Church in 1891, the recent immigrant from England did not know Lizzie nearly as well as Reverend Buck. What he did know about her, however, was apparently enough to put him squarely in her corner. Jubb often escorted Lizzie into the courtroom during her trial and sat beside her while she endured testimony intended to persuade the jury that she was a murderous monster. He continued on as pastor of the church until 1896, at which time he retired and returned to England with his wife.