Opportunity

In 1893, not long after Lizzie was found “not guilty” by a jury, a pamphlet appeared that cleverly mocked the verdict. “The Mystery Unveiled: The Truth About the Borden Murders,” written under the nom de plume of Todd Lunday, declared that no one killed Andrew and Abby Borden. Why? Because “the only person with unhindered opportunity” had been legally acquitted and it would have been impossible for a hypothetical intruder (who he dubbed Villain) to get into the house undetected. “I should like to find the man who thinks it at all probable,” he wrote, before scoffing at the idea that anyone could believe it “the remotest probability.”

Lunday echoed the closing argument of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton at Lizzie’s trial. Knowlton insisted not only was it improbable that anyone else could have killed her father and stepmother, but also that it was effectively impossible for anyone else to have committed the crime. Lizzie Borden, he declared, was the only one with opportunity. Imagine, said Knowlton, “a person who was so familiar with the habits of the family, who was so familiar with the interior of that house, who could foresee the things that the family themselves could not see … to have penetrated through the cordon of Bridget and Lizzie, and pursued that poor woman up the stairs to her death, and then waited, weapon in hand, until the house should be filled up with people again that he might complete his work. I won’t discuss with you the impossibility of that thing.” But, of course, he did discuss it and concluded that “there had been no more chance if there was any conceivable possibility existing to mankind that anybody else got in, than there would be getting into this room and you and I not seeing them.”

Andrew Jennings had acknowledged the prosecution’s position as far back as the preliminary hearing. “They say no one could get out on the south because Mrs. Kelly is there, Crowe’s yard is there, men are working there and there is the Chagnon house. You have Mrs. Churchill on the north and others on the west. The first thing they’ve got to do in order to draw the line around the people in the house is to isolate the house. Now what is the fact?” He then listed a number of reasons why it was inaccurate to suggest that the house was impenetrable, including the precedent of a daytime burglary at the house the year before in which a man was able to get in and steal money and other items from Andrew’s locked desk with the inhabitants none the wiser. He also made it clear that Bridget, even though he didn’t believe her guilty, had just as much opportunity as Lizzie, and wondered aloud why she hadn’t been subjected to the same kind of suspicion and investigation as Lizzie.

He then reminded the jury that Bridget had testified that the side screen door had been left unlocked a good part of the morning while she was out washing windows. “Now if that door wasn’t locked gentlemen, Lizzie wasn’t locked in and everybody else wasn’t locked out … There was a perfect entrance to that house by the rear screen door, wasn’t there?” This showed that an “assassin” certainly could have made his way inside, “without question, the house was all open on the north side.” He then talked at length about how an intruder might have managed it and dismissed the prosecution’s conclusion. “You can see then how everything in this idea of exclusive opportunity falls to the ground, because there was no exclusive opportunity.”

Improbable, but Not Impossible

Even as Knowlton was pronouncing that there was no “conceivable possibility” of an intruder getting into the house, he was also heaping praise on police officers for exhausting themselves in pursuing every lead, roaming from city to city, in their search for an intruder. So, if the police didn’t think it possible an intruder had committed the crime, why did they go to such effort searching for one? By their actions, they admitted it was not so impossible; they just didn’t succeed in finding a viable culprit. Of course, their lack of success could be because, despite Knowlton’s assertion to the contrary, they didn’t really try all that hard to identify an intruder. They were genuinely convinced from literally the first day that Lizzie was the killer, and within four days they had a warrant for her arrest signed by a judge. From that point on, police officers spent the majority of their time and effort investigating Lizzie, or so it appears from their preserved reports (a.k.a. the Witness Statements). If an intruder did kill the Bordens, he clearly didn’t have to worry much about being discovered by the police.

Still, it would be fair to say that just because it was possible for an intruder to have entered the house without being detected, that doesn’t mean it would have been easy. Getting inside the house undetected would have been fraught with difficulty of all sorts; and, ironically, it was Lizzie herself who, with her inquest testimony, multiplied the difficulty by placing herself in the kitchen, in sight of the screen door, for the majority of the time it was left unlocked. She also placed herself at the barn window most of the time she was up in the barn loft supposedly eating pears, again within sight of the screen door. From the perspective of guilt, Lizzie including these details in her testimony was a “mistake” on her part, a failure to foresee how her invented story would leave police no other option but to identify her as the killer. From the perspective of innocence, however, it shows us that Lizzie did not attempt to come up with a lie that would make the idea of an intruder more believable but told the truth about her whereabouts as well as someone who’d gone through an intense shock could remember it.

So, while it is true that Lizzie had the most obvious opportunity to commit the murders, as well as the most practical opportunity, it is not true that she had exclusive opportunity. There was opportunity, however slim, for an intruder to have done the deed. Many can’t fathom how an intruder could have squeezed himself through the narrow path formed by the obstacles he would have faced (Lizzie Borden message boards are full of personal lists of such obstacles), and so they keep their eye firmly on Lizzie. But, as Robinson also told the jury, it would be a grave mistake to declare Lizzie guilty “simply for the reason that you do not see how anybody else could do it. That is very dangerous ground.”

Author’s Take

Try as I might, I have never been able to completely rule out Lizzie as the killer because even without direct physical evidence pointing to her, there are enough reasons to suspect her, with her indisputable opportunity near the top of the list. However, I do not see her opportunity as exclusive (it clearly wasn’t), nor do I see it as unhindered. She would have faced formidable obstacles of her own, including the unforgiving gaze of police officers on her person within minutes of the final hatchet blow. The more research I do, and the more misconceptions about the case I uncover, the more challenging it becomes for me to see how she could have premeditated those murders, let alone accomplished them, with all the various unknowns she would have had to navigate. And many facts simply don’t fit into the picture of Lizzie as killer.

Thus, I also find myself unable to rule out an intruder as easily as so many others manage to do. I especially can’t rule out an intruder merely because the Fall River Police Department flailed and failed to come up with any other viable suspects. First, there were no actual detectives on the force, and even if there had been, they would have been severely limited by 1892 standards of crime solving. Second, as Lizzie’s defense attorney recognized, officers were so myopically focused on Lizzie that they didn’t do their due diligence in developing other leads. Many newspaper editorials of the day said as much in their open criticisms of the department.  

Yes, the defense’s intruder theory was based on conjecture, but so was the prosecution’s theory that Lizzie was the killer. And yes, it would have been more challenging, at least at the outset, for an intruder to gain opportunity, and he would have needed a certain amount of luck to pull it off. But the same goes for Lizzie, a fact that is rarely acknowledged. Most often, we start with a story that puts the hatchet in her hand, then decide how each thing she did serves that story, then minimize the facts that don’t quite fit. It is an interesting thought exercise to flip the script and begin with a story that puts the axe in an intruder’s hand, then examine how each thing serves that story, then minimize the facts that don’t quite fit. Both stories turn out to be equally plausible in that they are both equally improbable. It is no wonder Todd Lunday, in his Mystery Unveiled pamphlet, cheekily declared “no one” killed the Bordens. Lizzie couldn’t have possibly done it, but no one else could have done it, and yet it was done.