Handleless Hatchet

How did this hatchet head, presented in the courtroom at Lizzie’s trial, come to be so discredited? More importantly, is there a possibility that the Handleless Hatchet is indeed the weapon that turned Lizzie Borden into history’s most famous axe murderess?

On August 4th, 1892, Officer Michael Mullaly was one of the first policemen sent to the Borden House to “make a report,” arriving at the house at 11:37 a.m., or about 20 minutes after news of the murders was first called in to Police Marshal Rufus Hilliard. At the trial, Mullaly testified that as soon as he entered the house, he asked Lizzie if there were any axes or hatchets in the house. Lizzie confirmed this to be so and said that Bridget Sullivan could show him where they were kept. Mullaly, along with Officer Doherty, soon trooped down the steps behind Bridget, who showed them the way to a box on a high shelf in which he said she reached up and took out two hatchets—one a shingle hatchet (for roofing), the other a claw hammer hatchet. (Bridget would testify that she never touched the hatchets; she merely showed them where the box was kept.) Mullaly also found two heavy wood-chopping axes in the “wood cellar” and laid all four of these implements near the south wall on the cellar floor. He also found the handleless head of a shingling hatchet (with a hammer end for pounding in nails and a notch in the blade for removing nails) in an old salt box of odds and ends. The hatchet head (which Robinson would later call “this little fellow”) was covered in ashes, as were the axes, likely from the nearby ash heap.

It was only four days later, on the Monday after the murders, on a third full search of the cellar, that Officer William Medley also discovered the hatchet head in the salt box. As Rachel McCarthy James described this hatchet in Whack Job: The History of Axe Murder, “stuck into the eye at the top was a chunk of the handle. Its end was splintered, the broken wood fresh as if the fracture were recent. Medley ‘sung out’ to his boss [Captain Dennis Desmond], who came to see it immediately. They rubbed at a little spot on the metal, because that’s a great idea, but couldn’t tell whether it was blood. Then Medley wrapped the little tool head in paper, trying not to disturb the sediment on the tool so it could be tested, and he headed for the marshal’s office.” And there the hatchet head sat ignored for several weeks.

By the time police arrested Lizzie on Thursday, exactly one week after the murders, they were confident that the claw hammer hatchet would come back positive for blood. Having the murder weapon in their possession would justify the shocking accusation they were making against an affluent woman of good reputation. Indeed, they were so sure that Dr. Wood would find evidence of blood on that hatchet that they asked for a delay to the start of the preliminary hearing until Wood could travel to Fall River to report his findings. However, Wood did not arrive with good news for those determined to convict Lizzie of the murders. He took the stand at the hearing and reported that not only did the claw hammer hatchet test negative for traces of blood and human hair (the hair discovered on the blade turned out to be cow hair), the length of the blade was 4.5 inches, too long to have inflicted most of the victims’ wounds. Nonetheless, Lizzie was still found “probably guilty” by Judge Blaisdell and returned to her jail cell to “await the decision of the Superior Court.”

The Making of a Murder Weapon

Despite the prosecution’s success at the preliminary hearing, the lack of a murder weapon in their case against Lizzie was now a problem. Lizzie had not left the house since raising the alarm only minutes after the murders, and there had been police standing guard around the house ever since. If she was the one who committed the crime as they believed, the weapon had to be somewhere in that house. Yet, they had searched the premises thoroughly several times, top to bottom, even going so far as to bring in a mason to take a chimney apart to find a guilty weapon. Suddenly, the Handleless Hatchet blade, which was 3.5 inches, the exact length of the victims’ wounds, became a viable option.

True, the handle was not attached to the hatchet, but the break just below the head seemed relatively fresh. Perhaps it had broken off during Andrew’s murder. Or, perhaps Lizzie had broken it off herself and then either hid the handle or burned it in the stove. In fact, the lack of a handle seemed almost proof that it was the murder weapon, as telltale blood could be easily washed off the blade, but would be difficult to scrub from the wood of a handle. Yes, the blade was old and rusty and covered in ashes, but perhaps it was too well covered. Perhaps Lizzie had dipped it in the ash heap while it was still damp from washing to disguise any possible traces of blood.

Victoria Lincoln explained how officers were able to talk themselves into believing this scenario when she summed up Fleet’s testimony at the trial. “All the other contents of the box [in which the hatchet was found] were simply dusty, and far dustier on the top, exposed side, than on the bottom, as one would expect when things had lain long in an open container. But the hatchet-head was coated on both sides with white coal-ash, like that of the ash heap beside the furnace. It looked as if it had been washed and then dipped while still moist into the ashes by someone who wanted to make it match the dusty contents of the box. It did not match.” Besides Fleet, several other officers, including Desmond and State Detective George Seaver, swore on the stand that the ashy coating on the handleless hatchet was more “coarse” than that of the fine dust on the other items in the box, with Desmond going so far as to say, “The dust that we found in general throughout the cellar was nothing at all such as was on that hatchet.” Meanwhile, the break in the handle appeared to “as clean of dust as though it was kept in a glass case,” as Knowlton put it in his closing. How could the break be free of ashes, while the handle was so thick with it, unless it was purposely plunged into the ash heap?

The only problem with their theory was that Dr. Wood found no blood on that hatchet head either. No matter: handle or not, blood or not, ashes or not, the hatchet head was the right size blade, and it was found in the cellar of the house where the murders were committed and where their suspect lived. Lacking any other possible weapon, the prosecution proceeded on the theory that the handleless hatchet, in the words of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton “may well have been” the weapon used to kill Andrew and Abby. Not even another right-sized hatchet found midway through the trial, just over the fence of the Borden yard and atop the Crowe barn, derailed the prosecution from its investment in the Handleless Hatchet.

And, at least at first, Knowlton and Moody seemed to make good headway into that argument with the testimony of medical experts giving robust support to that theory. Dr. Frank Draper was particularly helpful when he introduced the actual skulls of the victims in the courtroom and demonstrated how the Handless Hatchet fit snugly into at least some cuts in the bone. On cross examination, Lizzie’s defense attorney, Melvin Adams made a deal of how common that type of Underhill hatchet was in New England, and asked Draper to fit a new hatchet of the same blade size of 3.5 inches into the wounds. Cara Robertson, in her book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden, suggested Adams was hoping to prove that the size of the handle of most equal-sized hatchets, being only a foot long, would require the killer to be at very close range to the victims, and thus necessarily become spattered with blood. However, this gambit backfired when Draper attempted to slip the new hatchet into the wounds in Andrew’s skull there in the courtroom and demonstrated that it didn’t fit. When Adams asked why not, Draper replied, “Because it was too blunt at the lower corner … on account of the thickness and the grinding.” In his opinion it wasn’t ground enough, meaning only an older, repeatedly used and repeatedly sharpened hatchet could have made the wounds.

But despite the earnest efforts of the prosecution to give credence to the handleless hatchet as the weapon, when all was said and done at trial, Knowlton would have reason to regret his choice to invest in the theory. In fact, presenting that hatchet head at trial was ultimately so damaging to the prosecution’s case that the press began calling it the “Hoodoo Hatchet.”  

The Unmaking of a Murder Weapon

The problems for the prosecution began after Officer Medley had described for the jury how, four days after the murders, he re-discovered the hatchet head that Fleet had dismissed, showed it to Desmond, then wrapped the hatchet head in paper and put it in his pocket to carry it to the police station. Desmond then took the stand and claimed it was he who did the wrapping of the hatchet head in paper from the water closet. On cross-examination from Lizzie’s lawyers, both Medley and Desmond would describe the paper differently (one said it was brown paper, the other said it was newsprint), and each would demonstrate their own very different method of blade-wrapping, leaving the jury unsure who to believe.

Then came another more dramatic contradiction in police testimony when Fleet described taking the hatchet head from the salt box and putting it back in on the day of the murders, and Mullaly then claimed he saw Fleet remove not only the hatchet head from the box but the broken handle, too. Under cross-examination from George Robinson, Mullaly said the handle he saw in Fleet’s hand “corresponded” with the hatchet head, but he also said he hadn’t seen it since and had no idea where it had gone. Robinson demanded to know where the handle was being kept, but Knowlton had to admit this was the first he had heard of it. Fleet was then recalled to the stand, unaware of Mullaly’s testimony, and assertively denied having seen the handle in the box. This caused a ripple through the courtroom: had the handle been in the box or not? More officers were quickly dispatched to the Borden house to look for the handle ten months after the fact but were denied entry to the Borden house. The demoralized police did not push the matter further, but the damage was done. Robinson made sure that the jury was left with the impression that police officers were either dishonest or incompetent.

Robinson, in his closing, poked fun at the debacle, telling the jury, “The handle is in it and it is out of it. Fleet didn’t see it and Mullaly did see it. Fleet didn’t take it out of the box and Mullaly saw him do it … We rather think that handle is still flying in the air, a poor orphan handle without a hatchet, flying around somewhere. For heaven’s sake, get the 125 policemen of Fall River and chase it till they can drive it in somewhere and hitch it up to its family belongings.”   

But even the embarrassment of the conflicting testimonies was ultimately less vexing to the prosecution’s theory of the crime than the lack of any evidence of blood on the weapon. Moody spent considerable time asking each of the medical experts if blood could have been washed off the rusty hatchet head, and while most agreed it was possible, on cross-examination most also admitted it would not have been easily or quickly done. And all were doubtful that blood could have been made to disappear from the eye of the hatchet, or, in the words of Dr. Woods, “between the helve and the head where these deep cracks are,” where the stub of splintered wood had been left and where white ashy debris yet remained. To be able to clean blood from such cracks, said Woods, “would be a very difficult matter.”

Still, Knowlton would stand by the hatchet head in his closing, reminding the jury that the medical experts were generally in agreement with this theory. He added that the defense did not call any experts of their own, even though they were entitled to do so; thus, “it is not for my distinguished friend to challenge the conclusion to which these gentlemen came, when their own experts are silent in reply.” He made a fair point; the defense did not do much to disprove their theory, simply tried to distract the jury by poking fun at it. And, said Knowlton, there was no denying that the Handleless Hatchet head, “almost miraculously fits to the cuts that the dead man presents to the eye of those [experts.]”

Yet when all was said and done, Robinson was not the only one to poke fun at the prosecution’s theory of the handleless hatchet as the weapon; many in the press reporting on the trial also found it to be an absurd proposition that Lizzie Borden not only managed to break off the handle and somehow make that disappear but also to make all blood thoroughly disappear from the eye of that blade in the thirteen minutes or so she would have had available to her to do it. And clearly, the jury was not convinced either; at the end of the trial they quickly came to a verdict of “not guilty.”

Through the Lens of Guilt

Despite the harm done to the theory of the handleless hatchet in the courtroom, and even Knowlton’s own acknowledgement he was not completely certain that the hatchet head was the weapon used, a number of Borden scholars would later contend it was indisputably the murder weapon and went about rehabilitating its reputation. Edmund Pearson, writing in 1937, embraced it firmly, and took a scoffing tone at anyone who doubted it. “There is an almost universal belief that the actual weapon was never found. Yet the Handless Hatchet fit all the requirements, and bore suspicious traces of having been recently washed, rubbed in ashes and deliberately broken.” (Although how anyone could possibly know if a break was “deliberately” made he did not say.)

Victoria Lincoln followed Pearson’s lead and presented her certainty that the handleless hatchet was the right weapon, attempting to make it more believable by suggesting Lizzie had gone out to the barn to break off the handle. She made much of the fresh break, writing, “The wood showed that unmistakable brightness of a newly sharpened pencil tip.” She believed it obvious that Lizzie used the vise in the barn to separate the blade from the handle. “One smart tap could have broken the handle off. Ash is strong, but it snaps; a baseball bat is ash and think how it will snap in two and fly across the park.” That she went to the barn to do it, said Lincoln, was supported by ice cream peddler Hyman Lubinsky’s sighting of her returning from the barn about ten minutes after 11 a.m.

While newspapers of the day may have concluded the Handleless Hatchet was one of the prosecution’s weakest pieces of evidence, Lincoln considered “the presence in the house of the murder weapon” the “prosecution’s strongest point,” saying the hatchet head was “authoritatively identified as being either the murder weapon or its exact duplicate.” She then summarized why she was certain it was the weapon. “A hatchet-head newly broken off from its handle; a hatchet-head that could have been washed free of detectable blood, though its handle could not; a hatchet-head concealed in a high-placed box, which no stranger to the house would have found, and coated with white coal ash from the nearby ash-heap to look less conspicuously clean in that box of dusty tools; a hatchet-head which according to the surgeons could not have been a shade longer, shorter, thicker, or thinner to have made a certain few of the many incisions on the skulls. This evidence was so superbly presented that it is amazing to read it and realize that … even those who believe Lizzie guilty will tell you that the weapon was never found.”

Lincoln’s book, like Pearson’s, was highly influential, and went far in cementing our cultural acceptance of Lizzie’s guilt. As a result, dozens of later authors who wrote their own accounts of the case often accepted, as often as not, that the Handleless Hatchet was the murder weapon. However, as the years have gone by, it has been defended far less often, and today, most in the Lizzie-is-guilty camp will concede the Handleless Hatchet is unlikely to be the weapon used in the killings. They will instead usually conclude that either: 1) Lizzie was able to hide the actual hatchet so cleverly the police never found it; or, 2) the actual murder weapon was the Crowe Hatchet found on the roof of a barn on the other side of the fence during the trial, sitting where Lizzie presumably pitched it immediately after the murders.

Through the Lens of Innocence

In 1913, two decades after the murders, Emma Borden gave the only interview she ever agreed to sit for with the press, telling Boston Sunday Post reporter Edwin Maguire that even though she’d had a parting of ways with her sister, it wasn’t because she believed Lizzie guilty. Interestingly, she maintained her defense of Lizzie not by pointing to her sterling character or love for their father, but because a weapon had never been found. “Lizzie, if she had done that deed,” said Emma, “could never have hidden the instrument of death so that the police could not find it. Why, there was no hiding place in the old house that would serve for effectual concealment.”

“Poor Emma,” wrote Victoria Lincoln, for believing in the “myth of the missing weapon.” But for Lizzie’s defenders, it was no myth. A viable weapon was never found, despite continuous effort by police in numerous searches to find one, and the desperate proposition that the rusted, dust-covered blade without a handle was the weapon that killed Andrew and Abby is simply too preposterous to believe. The experts confirmed that the only way someone of ordinary strength could have delivered the killing blows was with the leverage created by a handle, and except for the testimony of Mullaly in plain contradiction of his superior officer, there was no evidence of a handle to go with that blade. As Robinson again mocked, “Now whether Mr. Mullaly or Mr. Fleet is right about it, there is no handle here now, and we will leave them to explore, and when they find it I hope they will carry it to the British Museum, because it ought not stay in this country, and I hope they will be there to deliver a lecture upon it, to tell the astonished multitude which one of them found it and which one did not find it, and which one of them saw the other put it back into the box when he did not put it back into the box.”

He also mocked police officers who took such pains on the stand to point out how suspicious they found the coarse ashes on the hatchet head, all of them claiming to notice it immediately, when in reality they were so lacking in suspicion of it, considering it “of no account,” that they didn’t bother to collect it until Monday after the murders. Even when they had it in their possession, they apparently paid no attention to it until August 30th, weeks after the crime, when they receieved the news that the claw hammer hatchet was not viable.

Robinson next asserted the handleless blade was too old and dull to have done the job. Whether it happened to fit in the wounds or not, it still had “to be sharp enough to cut the eyeball, which you will make up your mind whether it would or not. It has also got to be sharp enough to cut Mrs. Borden’s natural hair, as cleanly as razor would do it, or shears. Do you believe it? … [This hatchet] could tear it, snarl it up, break it, but not the other thing.” As for that so-called “fresh break” of the handle, not one witness, police officer or medical expert, was able to be confidently say how fresh the break was. “Could be an hour or a day or a week or months. Mr. Seaver was a carpenter, and he could not say within six months when that handle had broken off. Professor Wood could not tell.”

And where, he asked, did they suppose the handle went if Fleet was telling the truth that there was no handle in the box? He believed it was their suggestion that Lizzie had wrapped it in paper and burned it in the kitchen stove, which is why Officer Phillip Harrington took such trouble to describe the roll of charred paper he’d seen in the stove an hour after the murder. “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world?” Robinson asked the jury. “A hard wood stick inside the newspaper, and the hard wood stick would go out beyond recall, and the newspaper that lives forever would stay there.”

A disgruntled Knowlton would clap back that he never claimed that the handle had been rolled up in paper, obviously realizing it would indeed be ridiculous to suggest a wood handle could have been completely burned to ash when a roll of paper had not fully burned. Yet, he left hanging the question of what then became of the handle if it was not burned. Did he believe she had hidden it? If Lizzie could hide the handle, along with the Bedford Cord dress Knowlton insisted she had successfully hidden, why wouldn’t she have hidden the hatchet head, too, rather than try to disguise it with ashes? The hatchet head was about the size of the palm of one’s hand, smaller than a bundled-up dress, so wouldn’t it have been easier and quicker just to hide it?

Robinson was undoubtedly right; the prosecution’s theory was absurd. The Handleless Hatchet, just as he concluded, was “an innocent hatchet.” And, by extension, Lizzie was innocent of the crime.

Author’s Take

“The human race has a remarkable ability to select and interpret facts according to its emotional needs,” wrote Lincoln. After reading her many far-fetched and fanciful theories of the Borden murders, including her belief in the Handleless Hatchet as the murder weapon, one wonders if she thought about her own emotional needs to make the so-called evidence against Lizzie fit what she grew up being told about Lizzie’s guilt. Certainly, it appears the police had an emotional need to prove themselves right about their suspicions of Lizzie, even if they had to come up with an implausibly complex narrative to explain to themselves and to the jury how she may have used the Handleless Hatchet to pull it off. As James wrote in Whack Job about their theory of that hatchet, “The logic of this is wild.”

It does indeed seem illogical to believe that Lizzie would commit a murder, figure out how to break the handle off (Lincoln’s baseball bat analogy aside, it would have taken more than a simple “tap” to break it), then make the handle vanish somewhere somehow, then do a rushed yet amazingly thorough job of washing the blade clean of blood before taking great pains to “disguise” it with ashes … then turn around and direct Bridget to show the police exactly where to find it. The police bought into this belabored and hard-to-believe theory and yet somehow the idea of an intruder simply taking the weapon out with him was more unbelievable to them?

I personally do not believe the Handleless Hatchet was the weapon that killed the Bordens, and I think the prosecution damaged their own credibility by going to the lengths they did to try to convince the jury it was. Of course, this doesn’t mean Lizzie wasn’t guilty; she may have been able to successfully hide the actual weapon inside the house. Although, it seems as unlikely to me as it did to Emma that she would have been able to do so with a dozen determined police officers who truly believed her guilty crawling all over the house and barn for days, looking for it.