Incest Theory

When the centennial conference on the 1892 Borden Murders in Fall River convened at Bristol Community College in 1992, it took place in a very different time than the closed-mouth, keep-your-business-to-yourself Victorian Era. It was the age of Oprah, talk shows and fearlessly revealing one’s past family traumas without shame. The conference also came on the heels of the child sexual abuse hysteria of the 1980s, when countless day care workers across the nation were questioned and investigated for abuse, leading to a number of them being tried and convicted for horrendous sex crimes against the children in their care.

With such an official sanctioning of the incest theory, it was quickly absorbed into the broader mythology of the Borden family dysfunction. Of course, statistically speaking, it is possible that Andrew may indeed have been an abuser, whether Lizzie killed him or not. According to the organization Incest Awareness, 17 percent of women today report one or more acts of abuse by a male relative before the age of 16, and more than half of those, 53 percent, were abused by their biological fathers. While there are no studies done about the prevalence of incest in the Victorian era, one can safely assume it was about the same. So, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether Andrew sneaked into one or both of his daughters’ rooms at night and took advantage of them. Yet, also statistically speaking, it is far more likely that he did not.

Whatever the odds, the fact that she was sexually abused became, for a time, simply what everyone knew about Lizzie. Even American Heritage Magazine, in a 1992 article written by Marcia Carlisle entitled, “What Made Lizzie Borden Kill?,” took it for granted that the best explanation for the murders was an incestuous relationship between Andrew and Lizzie. After explaining all the reasons this was likely so, Carlisle summed up her conclusions:

No single disorder is enough to make a case for a family at war with itself. But viewed as a pattern, the long-time absence of a wife-mother, the ages of the girls at the time of their mother’s illness, the autocratic father, the isolation of the family, the failure of the family to bond as a unit when the new Mrs. Borden moved in, the timing of the move to the new house, the structure of the house, the special relationship between Lizzie and her father, the tensions between both daughters and the stepmother—all these together suggest long-standing structural flaws that could have led to family violence and to the murders.

Today, almost 35 years later, the theory that Lizzie was sexually abused by Andrew is no longer a fresh insight and no longer much discussed on forums about the murders, perhaps due to the lack of the barest hint of evidence for it. (In reality, all evidence points to Lizzie and Andrew having a fond connection, albeit a non-demonstrative one, in accordance with the Victorian time and the New England place.)

Still, even without recent academic papers to feed the theory, it remains a well-established possibility, more or less grandfathered into discussions on the murders, and powered by its own circular logic that sounds like: If Lizzie killed her father, then, of course, he must have sexually abused her; and, of course, we know he sexually abused her, because Lizzie killed him.

A Miscalculated Starting Point

Herein lies the biggest problem with entertaining the notion that Andrew turned Lizzie into his sexual partner—it first requires certainty that Lizzie committed the murders, when she was actually declared “not guilty” by a jury.

Of course, in 1992, certainty that Lizzie killed her father and stepmother was a given, as it had been for many decades, thanks to the work of authors like Edwin Porter, Edmund Pearson, and Victoria Lincoln, who cemented Borden lore. It wasn’t even a question at the time of the centennial. Literally every speaker but one at the conference spoke from a guilt perspective, never so much as questioning it. Not that one can blame them, it would have been difficult to question the long-established “fact” that Lizzie was a hatchet murderess in the days before the internet, when courtroom transcripts and source documents were not available to read, at least not without herculean effort. Nor did case observers in 1992 have access to much of the information we have today about Lizzie and the murders that has been put forth in recent decades by the Fall River Historical Society and the dedicated historians at lizzieandrewborden.com.

Culturally, it would be fair to say that Lizzie’s guilt is still a given. Ask most anyone on the street who has heard of Lizzie Borden, and they will say, “yeah, sure, Lizzie killed her parents,” and a good portion of them will be surprised when told she was acquitted of the murders. But serious students of the case today who take time to research are as likely to be uncertain of her guilt as to be convinced of it, and some (like this writer) may even be willing to argue for Lizzie’s innocence.

Lack of certainty about Lizzie’s guilt leaves one in a morally questionable place from which to approach the incest theory. It is no longer so easy to play blame-the-victim with Andrew, or to declare him a monstrous child molester who all but deserved to die. Indeed, because it seems such an unethical accusation against Andrew, who likely did nothing more to invite his murder than lie down on his sofa for a nap, it is tempting to end this entry here, declare the incest theory unprovable and walk away from it.

Yet, just because we can’t be certain Lizzie wasn’t guilty doesn’t mean she wasn’t guilty. Her indictment for the crime by a grand jury tells us there are good reasons to suspect she was indeed the person who wielded the hatchet that so brutally ended the lives of Andrew and Abby Borden (see Case for Guilt). And many serious scholars of the case have studied every word of the source documents and remain convinced that Fall River police arrested the right person.

Thus, for the sake of argument, let’s assume Lizzie Borden was guilty of the murders. Why shouldn’t the motive that the prosecution offered—that Lizzie hated her stepmother and perhaps feared being disinherited—be enough to justify Lizzie killing her mother and stepfather? Why, without even the slightest evidence, should we hypothesize sexual abuse?

A Viable Theory?

Lack of evidence, of course, means little when it comes to incest. Even if Andrew had abused Lizzie continually, there would be no evidence of it. Sexual abuse has always lived in the shadows, kept quiet under a blanket of secrecy and shame.

Still, incest remains a compelling theory to many, because if Lizzie did indeed commit the murders, there was otherwise little motive to justify the savagery with which they were butchered. True, Lizzie didn’t much like her stepmother, but that isn’t an unusual situation in stepfamilies now, and it wasn’t then either. (Back in 1892, the high maternal mortality rate during childbirth meant there were many stepfamilies.) But no matter what the prosecution wanted the jury to believe, the relationship between Lizzie and Abby was, by all accounts, cordial and respectful, while her fondness for her father was well-established.

Yet, in the very definition of overkill, Abby suffered nineteen hatchet blows to the back of her head, repeatedly shattering her skull. And Andrew’s face was obliterated with another ten blows, turning it into a “mass of raw meat,” as one witness put it. If we ask what could have motivated such rage, and what could have gone so wrong in that family, incest answers it neatly.

“A growing body of literature on women and family violence has given us a vantage point that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago, or even 20 years ago,” wrote Carlisle. “And in examining distant events through the lens of the present day, we find an impressive body of circumstantial evidence to suggest, in that bloody morning’s work, the awakening rage of the incest survivor.”

In an academic study on parricides, we learn it is unequivocally true that when parent is murdered by their own child (about two percent of all homicides in the U.S.), and if the offender was a juvenile at the time, then there is a 90 percent chance that child was a victim of abuse of one kind or another. But when the offender who kills a parent is over the age of 30, that calculus changes and other reasons come into play, most commonly severe mental illness or other antisocial disorders. According to the authors of the study, “A great proportion, but not all adult parricidal offenders, indeed suffer from a major psychiatric disorder.” The study later identifies that proportion as up to 80 percent, with the caveat that a good number of them likely developed a mental disorder, in part, because of family dysfunction or abuse.

Either way, we know that District Attorney Hosea Knowlton briefly attempted to make a case that Lizzie was “insane” or suffering from some mental affliction, but he could find no evidence to support it. Nor did any behavior she displayed before or after the murders suggest that Lizzie suffered from any kind of mental illness or anti-social disorder. She was known to practice social avoidance at times, but that is not a sign of mental illness, it is more a sign of an introverted nature or, perhaps, autism.

A certain percentage of parricides are known to be triggered by rage, but those are usually unplanned, spur-of-the-moment killings, so that was unlikely to apply to the Borden murders. First, we know from Bridget Sullivan and others that Lizzie and her parents had not had any arguments recently; in fact, no witness could think of any angry argument between Lizzie and her parents ever, except for a “difference of opinion” (Lizzie’s words) over a property transfer five years earlier that had been quickly settled. Second, we know the morning of August 4th was going along normally. Third, the prosecution believed Lizzie premeditated the killings, so impulsive rage is not a factor there. But perhaps the long-simmering rage of an incest survivor is a possibility.

The papers presented at the centennial conference on the murders purported to uncover many clues that suggest Lizzie and/or Emma had been sexually abused by their father—the authors dipping into books on the crimes, then selectively using different aspects of the case to shore up their conclusions. They cite the many locked doors in the house as pointing to an obsession with privacy and secrecy. They also assert that the sisters’ difficulty with Andrew’s property transfer to Abby was a sign of “confusion” over their relationship to their father, as if they clearly believed they had “earned” the same privileges as a wife.

Many such arguments that Andrew was guilty of sexual abuse, just like arguments that Lizzie was guilty of murder, were based on “facts” that were purely speculative in 1892 and remain speculative today. Further, many were non-speculative facts that simply got roped into the argument. Lizzie never married, so that could indicate she developed a fear of men due to abuse. Abby never had a child after her marriage to Andrew, and that could indicate her relationship with Andrew was asexual. So Andrew had nowhere else to turn for sexual gratification other than his daughters. One conference presenter even asserted that Andrew’s payments to seamstresses for Lizzie’s dresses and the gifting of property to her reflect “a symbiotic arrangement that kept Lizzie entrenched at home, developmentally disadvantaged and sexually abused.”

Of course, even those who suspect incest was a strong possibility in the Borden family are not likely to believe that Andrew, a month shy of his 70th birthday at the time of the murders, was then actively fondling his nearly middle-aged daughters, who did indeed keep themselves behind locked bedroom doors (as did Andrew and Abby). What incest theory supporters most often suggest is that Lizzie had repressed her memories of abuse as a child, but they had recently resurfaced.

A Ticking Time Bomb

“Delayed discovery” of sexual abuse, wrote Carlisle, “has a ‘time-bomb quality.’ When such an awakening happens today, a skillful therapist can guide the survivor through the tangled morass of feelings. Dr. Judith Herman, a leading authority on father-daughter incest, helped one group of adult women through the healing process recently. The median age in the group was Lizzie’s at the time of the murders, 32. The majority were white, educated, and unmarried and had suffered some degree of amnesia about the incest. Many were engaged in the ‘helping professions,’ today’s counterpart to the church activities that were important to Lizzie in the 1890s.”

But, Carlisle added, “in the 1890s, the silence around incest could not be broken in a healing fashion. Women who remembered were left alone to bear the hurt, the anger, and the sense of worthlessness and guilt that can emerge.” A proper Victorian gentlewoman like Lizzie would have had no avenue through which to vent her feelings. Furthermore, as more or less the legal property of her father, she had no way to escape him. She was trapped in the house with him. And he, in turn, was trapped in a house with his angry victim.

If all that was true, then perhaps it is not surprising she took a hatchet to his head. But if abuse by Andrew, recently remembered or not, was her motive, then why kill Abby? There are psychological arguments for that, too. Often a child blames the mother who did not protect her from the father’s abuse. Sometimes it even feels safer to blame the mother, because the feelings for the father are so tangled up in love and confusion. And sometimes the daughter groomed to be her father’s “special girl” can feel jealous of the father’s wife, her sexual rival. The fact that Andrew wore Lizzie’s ring on his finger, rather than his wife’s, could have meant a sentimental preference for Lizzie. And there is no doubt Lizzie displayed a certain resentment toward Abby, so a kind of rivalry is not entirely out of the question. (Victoria Lincoln, in fact, specifically asserted that Lizzie saw herself as Abby’s rival for Andrew’s affections.)

One presenter at the centennial conference, who noted that Lizzie showed no signs of a violent personality either before or after the murders, believed the “intense rage [that] exploded out of her like a volcano, never to be repeated” could only properly be explained by “a history of incest.” She found further support for her theory in the stanza that Lizzie had carved into her mantelpiece at Maplecroft, the house on French Street where she spent the last three decades of her life.

The green leaf of loyalty’s beginning to fall

The Bonnie White Rose it is withering an’all

But I’ll water it with the blood of usurping tyranny

And green it will grow in my ain’ country.

“To my mind,” concluded the presenter, “this is clearly Lizzie’s confession, her public statement at last, where she admits she stopped tyranny and with its blood began anew.”

While we have no idea why Lizzie chose that poem for her mantelpiece, there is no denying that the presenter homed in on a decent argument for the incest theory.

Author’s Take

I understand why so many authors wonder if Lizzie Borden could have killed her parents as a delayed reaction to childhood incest. But, of course, those are the authors who already believe Lizzie was guilty of the murders, despite a lack of evidence to convict her. Barring certainty that Lizzie was the murderer, which I believe is unwarranted, I am not comfortable speculating that Andrew was a child molester or worse, a child rapist.

Further, from what I have read from those who promote the incest theory in regard to Lizzie, the labored efforts to connect the fuzzy dots of what we know of the Borden family are not all that convincing to me. In fact, some of those efforts are quite eye-rolling. For example, one paper presented at the conference suggested that the club Andrew had whittled and kept under his bed, presumably for protection should a burglar invade his house again, revealed him as a sadist with a fascination for implements of torture, which of course made him more likely to be a child molester. I don’t believe Andrew Borden should be forced to carry such suspicions just to make it easier to believe Lizzie was guilty of killing him.

I will say, though, that if Lizzie was indeed the one who buried a hatchet into Andrew and Abby’s heads, then rage over incest is the motive I am most inclined to believe. The numerous other motives most often suggested—hatred, money, unfortunate necessity—are unsupported conjecture. Which, of course, is probably why the incest theory gained such traction in the first place. But in my mind, the incest theory is unsupported conjecture as well, and the fact that so many turn to it is yet another indicator of how weak the case is against Lizzie Borden.