John Morse Biography

Rhody, John, and Sarah’s mother, died in 1843, when John was 10 years old, and two years before Sarah’s wedding to Andrew. Their father, Anthony, remarried and had several more children. According to genealogist Glen Joe Carlson, writing for The Hatchet, at some point between 1850 and 1855 (around the time John reached adulthood), Anthony Morse moved his family to Girard, Illinois.

John Morse began his work life in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, learning the butcher trade in the meat business of Charles and Isaac Davis. When he was 22, he followed his family to the Midwest. He first stayed with his brother William in Minnesota for about a year, then moved to Illinois, where he lived for 14 years, perfecting the art of farming. He eventually bought 220 acres land near Hastings, Iowa, and established two prosperous farms, where he also engaged in cattle-raising and horse-trading.

Interestingly, he seemed not to want to actually live on his land, usually boarding with a brother-in-law or with others, perhaps because he was so often away from Iowa. As he told a New Bedford newspaper in 1909, he would take “many carloads of horses to the eastern market and take many a carload of cattle to the Chicago stockyards.” His efforts made him financially successful enough to buy himself the leisure to spend long stretches of time in Massachusetts, visiting his many relatives there, including the Bordens.

John never married, although after the murders, a Cedar Rapids newspaper reported that he tried to attract a wife after settling in Iowa. But, said the paper, “no girl seemed to take kindly to the long, lanky, awkward, hard-featured fellow, who dressed like a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant.”

These reporters could have been describing Andrew J. Borden as well, which is probably why the former brothers-in-law got along so well. The two men enjoyed talking with each other about business, whether farming or real estate, and Andrew was known to value John’s opinion about the worth of any property he was interested in purchasing.

With their mutual interests and easy camaraderie, John was always welcome at the Borden house. Indeed, on one of his trips East, John once stayed with the Borden family for an entire year and a half, sleeping in an attic bedroom. Perhaps it was during this visit that his niece Emma grew close enough to him to later testify at the inquest that she considered him a “very dear uncle of ours, of mine.”

John had been on an extended stay in Massachusetts in the two-and-a-half years before the murders, residing with different relatives and friends. He visited Andrew regularly. In the summer of 1892, he was in Fall River every few weeks, taking the train from Dartmouth, where he was staying with his friend, a butcher named William Davis. It so happened he also showed up at the Borden house on the very day before the murders.

Uncle John Arrives Unannounced

“In a detective novel, the arrival of a person like Mr. Morse, so close to the culmination of a tragedy, would have some special significance, or would be a deliberately planted false clue,” wrote crime journalist Edmund Pearson in 1937. “Life, however, has an odd way of putting upon the scene quite meaningless characters … By evil fortune, he wandered into the reek of a slaughterhouse.”

It is often considered “suspicious” that John Morse showed up out of nowhere the day before the murders, especially without a whit of luggage or even a toothbrush, as so many authors like to point out. Although, again, John often showed up at the Borden house and had already been to visit several times that summer.

As for why he showed up without any luggage, it was likely he wasn’t planning to spend the night with the Bordens when he got on the train the morning of August 3rd. He had been corresponding with Andrew about helping him find some farm help and to facilitate the sale of several cows from Andrew’s farm to his friend, the butcher. From what can be gleaned by his testimony at the preliminary hearing, it seems he expected that, once he arrived, Andrew would ride our with him to Swansea to finalize arrangements for the transfer of the cattle.

Instead, he learned that Andrew, Abby, and Lizzie had been violently ill the night before, and that Andrew was not up to a long carriage ride. He also learned from Andrew and Abby that he had a niece and nephew in town, visiting from Minnesota, who had expressed a desire to see him. And so, John sat talking with the elder Bordens for awhile then rented a hack from a stable up the street to make the trip to Swansea himself. After stopping to have supper with a Mrs. Vinnicum, John continued on to the farm to speak to Frank Eddy, the man who ran it for Andrew, bringing with him several ripe pears and accepting fresh eggs to take back to the Borden house. He also told Eddy he would arrange with Andrew to pick up the cattle on Saturday.

John arrived back at the Borden house about 8:40 p.m., having already accepted Andrew’s invitation to spend the night in the guest room upstairs, so he could visit his niece and nephew the next morning. The two men sat together in the darkening sitting room, talking. John said he heard someone (he assumed Lizzie) come in the front door around 9 p.m., but neither made the effort to greet each other. At about 10 p.m. the men turned in, neither having any idea it would be Andrew’s last night alive.

The Day of the Murders

John testified that, on the morning of August 4th, he woke up at about 6 a.m. and was the first one downstairs. He sat reading the paper in the sitting room, chatting with Andrew, then joined Andrew and Abby in the dining room for a breakfast of cold mutton, and warmed over mutton broth along with Johnny cakes (pancakes made from corn meal). While at the breakfast table, John said he teased Andrew about an item he had read in the paper about the wealthy Jay Gould selling his yacht, telling him he should buy himself that boat. Andrew laughed and said, “What little good would it do me if I really did have it?” John also testified to hearing Abby instruct Bridger to wash the windows as they ate.

After breakfast, the three went back into the sitting room and sat talking for a bit, then Abby got up to start her morning chores. Andrew and Morse continued reading the newspapers and talking for a total of “an hour and three-quarters.” Somewhere between 8:20 and 8:25 a.m., Abby disappeared into the front hall and, according to John, she did not return to the sitting room while he was still there. Presumably, she climbed the stairs to the guest room to straighten up and put clean sheets on the bed Morse had just slept in.

At 8:40 a.m. John decided to leave for a trip downstreet to see his niece and nephew. Andrew let him out the back door and invited him to return for the noon meal. Morse first walked to the post office, where he sent a postcard, then walked about a mile to the other side of downtown to visit his relatives who were staying with a Mrs. Emery at 4 Weybosset Street. His nephew was not there, but his niece was, so he stayed visiting for over an hour. (Police would later verify with Mrs. Emery that John Morse had indeed been at her house during the time the murders took place.)

At 11:20 a.m., John left the Emery house and caught a horsecar that dropped him on the corner of Second Street. He said he walked the final few blocks to the house, arriving about 11:45 a.m. He went in through the north gate and walked by the screen door to the pear tree in the backyard to pick up a pear from the ground to eat.

Although numerous people were known to have been milling about in front of the house and in the back yard between 11:30 and 11:50 a.m., John said he didn’t notice many people outside the house or anything out of the ordinary, something that often strikes observers as odd. However, we know that once Assistant Marshal John Fleet arrived at the house, which was about 11:50 a.m., he had the yard “cleared” of people tromping about, so perhaps Morse arrived after officers chased off the curious. Either that, or he arrived much sooner than he believed, say at 11:30 a.m., before the crowd had a chance to gather. (If he caught a horsecar only a few minutes after he left the Emery house at 11:20, he may have covered the mile-long trip through town rather quickly.)

After grabbing the pear, Morse entered the house through the screen door and was told by Bridget of the murders. A stunned Morse went into the sitting room and viewed Andrew’s body, then climbed partway up the stairs where he could see Abby’s body. He then went into the dining room to declare to Lizzie, “My God, how did this happen?!” Afterward, he went out to the yard, where he said he walked around in different parts of the yard for the next three or four hours.

By the next day, John had recovered from his initial shock and was noted to be busy about town, walking to and from the post office or stepping outside to talk with reporters. While his neighbors in Iowa might have considered the John Morse they knew to be a reserved man, in the aftermath of the murders he was the one inhabitant of the Borden house who was willing to answer questions from the press. For several days he became a veritable chatterbox with reporters, expressing the family’s profound confusion over how the murders could have happened. Eventually, Andrew Jennings asked him to stop giving interviews.

John Morse as Suspect, Then and Now

Within hours of the murders, Officer William Medley visited Mrs. Emery on Weybosset Street and confirmed John’s alibi. But that didn’t mean officers didn’t intend to keep an eye on Lizzie’s uncle, and it certainly didn’t mean the public was satisfied he wasn’t the killer. After all, the police were already making it known that they believed “one of the inhabitants of the house” was the most likely culprit.  

When John left the house on Friday morning, Officers Harrington and Doherty followed him and wrote up a report about everything he did. “He went to the P. O., stopped about a minute, went out and crossed to Geo. E. Howe’s where he purchased a two-cent stamp. He then returned to the P. O. and at 8.32 A.M. dropped a letter addressed to Wm. A. Davis So. Dartmouth. It bore the words ‘In haste’. On his way home he tried the Daily News door, and it was not open.”

Later that same day, John made another trip to the post office, and the crowd loitering out front of the Borden house turned into a mob that trailed him into town. The men following him gathered such angry steam that a police officer, worried he had a lynch mob on his hands, had to escort him back to the house to safety. The next evening, the police marshal and the mayor used that incident to tell John, Emma, and Lizzie that they needed to stay in the house, essentially putting them under house arrest. (For more on their visit, see You Are Suspected.)

Eventually, the lack of any sort of evidence against John in the murders, let alone any kind of motive, made it so that the eye of police suspicion turned away from him. Once he testified before the grand jury, he was allowed to leave Fall River and return to Iowa until the trial. However, public suspicion about the uncle who showed up unannounced has not only remained but has actually intensified over the intervening decades.

Indeed, for those who find the case against Lizzie to be less than convincing, the person they are most likely to point to as responsible for the murders is John Morse. Why? First, there was that “too-perfect alibi,” in which it was said he could remember the horse-car conductor’s badge number (a myth). And, of course, there is the fact that he trained as a butcher so would know how to use a hatchet with deadly precision.

But perhaps the biggest reason he shows up as the most popular alternative suspect is because Arthur Phillips, one of the members of Lizzie’s defense team, was so publicly suspicious of him.

Arthur Phillips vs. John Morse

In the late 1930s, Phillips was writing a history of Fall River and decided to include a chapter that included his memories of working on the Borden case. He recalled that John Morse had been a target of investigation by the defense. It is often reported that Andrew Jennings sent a Pinkerton private detective to Iowa to dig up information about Morse. There had also been rumors that John Morse was involved with some shady horse traders in Westport, which, according to newspaper reports in 1892, police went to some trouble to investigate. They ultimately concluded they were only rumors.

Yet, apparently, young Andrew Phillips gave a lot of credence to these rumors, and decades later he was still mulling it over and trying to find evidence of his suspicions about John. In his posthumously published book, he suggested that at the time of the murders, John “was the owner of some recently imported horses which were kept at the camp of some itinerant horse traders in Westport.” He added that Andrew Borden had invested money in these horses and further stated that “there was evidence that Mr. Borden and Mr. Morse had a lengthy and very loud argument during the previous (Wednesday) evening. They made so much noise that Lizzie closed the door of her upstairs room.”

While Phillips’ did not draw any conclusions from these intriguing statements, they are contradicted by John Morse’s testimony in court in which he said he hadn’t done any horse trading that “amounted to anything” since he first brought horses back from Iowa with him two years earlier. Plus, there is no actual evidence that Andrew and John got into a loud argument the night before the murders. The fact that Andrew invited him to stay the night, and the two sat around together in the morning reading the paper and cracking jokes about Jay Gould’s yacht over breakfast strongly suggests otherwise.

Still, Phillips was like a dog with a bone. In a 1939 letter he is said to have written to Homans Robinson, the son of Lizzie’s lead attorney George Robinson, he requested access to his father’s files on the case. “This case was not so much a mystery as people believe and that facts were available which the police did not produce at the trial.” If this letter is legitimate, it is not clear whether Phillips was suggesting police were holding back exculpatory evidence regarding Lizzie, but it seems from the context of the letter that Phillips believed police were indeed brushing off possible evidence of an intruder or otherwise keeping it under wraps. Whether this is true or not, Phillips’ hints about John Morse have given later case observers plenty of fodder for suspicion about him.

In the 1960s, both Edward Radin and Victoria Lincoln put a lot of emphasis on Morse in their alternative theories. Lincoln cast him as part of a plot cooked up by Andrew to deed one of his Swansea farms to Abby and hide the transfer from Lizzie. She asserted that Morse was still lurking near the house when Lizzie killed Abby, realized what had happened and quickly hightailed it downtown to give himself an alibi. Most authors who follow suit and put John Morse front and center as a suspect usually make him a co-conspirator rather than the killer. After all, his alibi was basically airtight, too perfect or not, so it’s hard to argue he wielded the hatchet himself.

Yet Uncle John, with his supposedly shady “itinerant horse trader friends,” makes it easy to cast him as a possible criminal mastermind, perhaps hiring a killer to get revenge for some business deal gone bad with Andrew. Or, perhaps to help protect his nieces from being cut out of Andrew’s will. Or, for any other reason that the conspiratorial imagination of an author can dream up.

John Morse, then and now, remains a handy piece on the chessboard to take the blame for those who wrestle with the unlikelihood of a mild-mannered Sunday school teacher rising up without provocation on an ordinary Thursday morning to butcher her parents.

Later Life

After Lizzie’s trial, John Morse made his way back to his farm in Hastings. He traveled frequently, with his local paper either noting he had just set off for another trip back East or  heralding his return from places such as California, where he spent several winters, or Kansas and Nebraska (in 1900). He was a fishing enthusiast, and, in his 1909 interview, he said he kept a boat in New Bedford for the purpose. He also spoke of his friendship with Thomas Thompson, the former progressive mayor of New Bedford, who owned a marble shop and was interested in the esoteric subjects that Morse enjoyed conversing about as well. We know from newspaper reports that he was particularly close with his niece, Anna Morse, the daughter of his brother William.

It was in February of 1912 that reporters first started reporting on his ill health. “Our old friend, John Morse, has been on the sick list the past week, and we are sorry to note that at present writing he is little if any improved. His many friends here hope for an early change for the better,” said the Malvern Leader. Another paper reported that his niece Anna had come to be at his side. Less than two weeks later, in early March, Morse died of heart failure. He was 79.