Inquest: Mitigating Factors

Lizzie Borden’s appearance at the inquest into the murders of her father and stepmother was famously damaging to her claim of innocence. One doesn’t have to get far into the transcript of her testimony to understand why District Attorney Hosea Knowlton became convinced the killer was sitting before him, twisting and turning in the face of his questions and weakly offering obvious falsehoods and nonsensical contradictions. Lizzie’s statements painted the very picture of a hapless murderer unable to explain herself.

First, we will briefly revisit the context of the inquest, then we’ll introduce a number of mitigating factors that, to one degree or another, undoubtedly impacted Lizzie’s ability to answer the questions that were put to her by Knowlton. (For a comprehensive look at Lizzie’s incriminating testimony and why it created such a strong impression of guilt, see Inquest: Conflicting Statements.)

Was It an Inquiry or Entrapment?

In the late 19th century, when a violent death occurred in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, state law required that an inquest overseen by a local district judge be conducted to determine not only cause of death but also who might be responsible. The inquest into the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden was to be expected. What was not expected was the way in which the inquest was used underhandedly by the police, in collaboration with the district attorney, as a strategy to compel their primary suspect to answer questions under oath without benefit of counsel in order to give them statements they could use against her. At least that is how Lizzie’s defense attorneys characterized what they considered the deceptive maneuvers of authorities regarding her appearance at the inquest, a characterization with which the judges presiding over her trial would ultimately agree.

Two days after the murders, Lizzie Borden was visited by the mayor and the police marshal and told not to leave her house. This, they said, was for her own protection, as was the number of police officers stationed around her house night and day; and oh yes, she was also suspected in the murders of her father and stepmother. Lizzie was essentially in police custody from that point forward. (Mayor John Coughlin would acknowledge as much to a Boston Post reporter before the inquest even started, saying of the inhabitants of the Borden house, “These people are practically under arrest now.”)

Four days after the murders, Police Marshal Hilliard already had a signed warrant in his pocket for Lizzie’s arrest. But he did not arrest her on that day; if he did, he would have legally had to advise her of her right to decline to answer any questions put to her, something her lawyer would have certainly advised her to do. This would present a problem for Knowlton, who definitely wanted her to answer his questions. Hilliard thus kept the warrant in his pocket and allowed Knowlton to issue a subpoena for Lizzie to appear at the inquest. The next day, Hilliard himself arrived at her house with a carriage to take her to the police station. Judge Blaisdell, in keeping with the tradition of privacy at inquests, denied Lizzie’s request to have her attorney with her. And so, Lizzie walked into the inquest alone, put her hand on the Bible and swore to tell the truth in what she was told was an inquiry that was meant to, in Knowlton’s words to her, discover the “author of the tragedy” that had taken her father and stepmother’s lives.

Knowlton did ask Lizzie six or seven questions about who she thought might have a reason to harbor ill feelings against either Andrew or Abby. He asked another several questions about the man she told him she heard arguing about her father, as well as the man she saw sitting at their back door one evening. And then he asked her over eight hundred other questions about her own movements in the hours before and after the murders. This was not a general inquiry into the circumstances around the murders, as had been presented to her by authorities, it was an aggressive interrogation of their primary suspect who was effectively in their custody, a suspect that had been denied counsel and thus deprived of the rights guaranteed her by law. At the preliminary hearing, Andrew Jennings called Lizzie’s treatment at the inquest akin to an “inquisition” and told the judge he considered it an “outrage.”

“Here was a girl they had been suspecting for days. She was virtually under arrest and yet, for the purpose of extracting a confession from her to support their theory, they brought her here and put her to the rack, a thing they knew they would have no right to do if they placed her under arrest … Day after day the same questions were repeated to her in the hope to elicit some information that would incriminate her. Is it a wonder there are conflicting statements?”

That was also the argument made by Lizzie’s lead defense attorney, George Robinson, at her jury trial, as well as the conclusion reached by the three-judge panel when they pronounced her testimony “involuntary” and blocked it from being read aloud in court.   

This ruling received a lot of criticism at the time, with much debate over the finer legal points of whether Lizzie’s testimony should have been considered admissible or not. And when we hear of the ruling today, it is easy to assume that Lizzie’s well-paid attorneys were able to suppress proof that she lied repeatedly at the inquest and thus helped her get away with murder. But there is a critical concept in the ruling that should compel us to take a closer look regarding testimony that is deemed involuntary.

Cara Robertson, in The Trial of Lizzie Borden, writes of “the powerful rationale of the case law on this point—the psychological insight that involuntary statements are often unreliable.” She cited a case in which a judge explains how even innocent people who are suspected of a crime may try to conceal damaging facts or concoct stories. “The mind, confused and agitated by the apprehension of danger, cannot reason with coolness,” said the court in State v. Gilman, “and it can resort to falsehood when the truth would be safer.”

This is not to suggest that an innocent Lizzie may have purposely lied to protect herself when she appeared at the inquest, this is only to say that being tricked into submitting to an interrogation creates fear and panic in the mind of the accused, which elicits statements that are legally unreliable. Involuntary testimony, made under duress, is essentially tainted testimony, and cannot be depended on in a search for truth. Thus, if we hope to get closer to the truth of whether Lizzie killed Andrew and Abby, it is important to remember that the context of her questioning was designed, whether by conscious intention or not, to extract statements from her that would give the district attorney ammunition with which to win a conviction. This was clear enough to the judges at her trial that they unanimously agreed to prevent the jury from hearing it. (For a more in-depth look at the proceeding and the judges’ controversial ruling, see Inquest.)

But of course, the context of the interrogation was just the first step in creating the conditions for unreliable testimony. Once the district attorney achieved his goal of getting Lizzie before him without counsel to advise her, his manner of questioning was also a factor in how her answers emerged, just as Jennings had observed.

Interrogation Techniques Matter

Lizzie’s own words at the inquest were so damaging to her claim of innocence, and so indicative of “consciousness of guilt,” that Knowlton, in a letter to state Attorney General  Arthur Pillsbury, called the testimony “her confession.” Of course, Lizzie didn’t confess to the murders, she continued to maintain her innocence, but the word does capture what careful readers of her testimony may sense was happening beneath the surface of Knowlton’s questioning of Lizzie.

Today, we know a lot more about the impact of aggressive interrogation techniques on those suspected of crimes, especially the conditions and tactics that are known to elicit false confessions. We also have statistics from the Innocence Project that tell us that when prisoners are exonerated through DNA evidence, 15 to 20 percent of those who were wrongfully convicted were deemed guilty because of false confessions gained through dubious interrogations. (The number one reason for wrongful convictions? Mistaken eyewitness identification; ironically, also a potential factor in the enduring impression of Lizzie’s guilt.)

When we imagine the kind of interrogation that results in a false confession, we might picture a sweating suspect sitting under hot lights, being loudly harangued, harassed and overtly pressured. But that is not always the case; in fact, according to the Innocence Project and their research on what contributes to self-incriminating testimony, it is often the more subtle methods that can break down a suspect’s resistance and make her desperate to say whatever the interrogator wants to hear, if only to put an end to the stress of the ordeal. The length of the interrogation turns out to be a big factor; long question-and-answer sessions lead to mental exhaustion and confused statements. (Lizzie was subjected to several hours-long sessions over the course of three days.) Isolation is also a factor in making the suspect feel they are at the mercy of the interrogator. (Lizzie faced Knowlton alone, without counsel.) Deception from the interrogators upsets the equilibrium of the suspect. (Lizzie’s testimony was ruled inadmissible because of the deceptive strategy used by the prosecution to get her to appear.) Lack of empathy from the interrogator can also demoralize a suspect and make her more prone to inaccurate statements. (Lizzie had just found her father murdered in her own home and was presumably engulfed in grief while a hostile Knowlton stood there demanding coherent answers.) These are all considered “psychologically coercive” interrogation techniques.

Meanwhile, in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, researcher Richard Leo describes a succession of “three sequential errors” that result in false confessions and other unreliable testimony. The initial error he calls the Misclassification Error: “Investigators first misclassify an innocent person as guilty.” This, he says, is “the first and the most consequential error that police make.” (See Rush to Judgment.) The second error he calls the Coercive Error, in which authorities “next subject [the innocent person] to a guilt-presumptive, accusatory interrogation.”

Leo notes that authorities are more likely to resort to this type of interrogation “in high-profile cases in which there is great pressure on police detectives to solve the crime.” (This certainly describes the Borden murders.) Another impetus for an accusatory interrogation is a perceived “lack of evidence” against the suspect,” where there is “no other source of potential evidence to be discovered.” (This also describes the Borden murders and the lack of any direct evidence against Lizzie.) But is this really a fair description of Knowlton’s questioning of Lizzie Borden at the inquest?

Knowlton On the Attack

In 1892, Hosea Knowlton was a highly respected district attorney, known to be a “man of honor.” In fact, his conduct at the Borden trial (inquest rebuke from the judges aside) would earn him accolades as a fair-minded litigator. Two years after the trial, he would replace Arthur Pillsbury as the new Massachusetts Attorney General. This was clearly a man with legal talent, and that talent was backed up by an imposing physical presence. Cara Robertson described him as “a man prefiguring a Teddy Roosevelt guide to masculinity, a large man who seemed the incarnation of solidity, powerful in body as well as mind. As one reporter later rhapsodized, he had ‘a head as hard as iron set on a neck that is a tower for strength. His shoulders are a yard apart. His legs are the foundation of a bridge. He is by nature combative, and snorts like a war horse’.”

Still another reporter at the Borden trial, Elizabeth Jordan, described Knowlton’s “rasping, unrelenting, irritating and not infrequently bullying methods” of examination. Years later, Edmund Pearson would also describe Knowlton’s bearing as “formidable” when, in 1901, he personally observed Knowlton examine a witness in a murder trial. “It struck me that his heavy frame and bulldog manner might easily terrify a dishonest witness and make even the honest one rather timid.”  

This was the man that Lizzie Borden faced at the inquest at a time when she was under extraordinary stress from violent and overwhelming events. However much observers liked to comment on Lizzie’s coolness under pressure, or as Knowlton put it, “her stoical nerve,” beneath her calm exterior she had to be daunted by this intimidating authority figure who stood firing questions at her.

Knowlton’s handling of Lizzie’s questioning is best revealed not only by reading the transcript, but by comparing the way he questioned Lizzie to how he questioned others who also appeared at the inquest. Like Lizzie, many of the witnesses were not always able to come up with the answers he sought. John Morse’s brief inquest testimony contained more than a dozen instances of “I could not tell you,” or “I don’t know.” Dr. Bowen said the equivalent of “I don’t know” numerous times. Meanwhile, when Knowlton asked Alice Russell what she remembered after she arrived at the house, she answered, “I remember nothing very connectedly.” Knowlton expressed understanding, saying to her, “I’m sure you were flustered.” A bit later, when she revealed she worried that the knobbed stick she found under Andrew and Abby’s bed might implicate her in the murders, he even joked with her, saying “About as much it implicates me, just about.” He treated each witness with respect and seemed to grasp that their memories were out of reach due to the shock of events.

Indeed, a few weeks later, at the preliminary hearing, Knowlton would openly acknowledge as much when, in answer to another one of Dr. Bowen’s admissions that he couldn’t remember the details of what he himself did, Knowlton sympathetically said, “Is it not the fact that the spectacle of those two bodies dazed you for awhile, so you had no adequate remembrance of what was going on?” Bowen answered, “It took some time, I must say, to straighten out my actions during the first half hour. It took me almost all the week to satisfy myself where I was.” Knowlton then asked, “What you do remember about it now is a conscious attempt to recollect what was entirely confused in your mind at the time?” Bowen replied, “Yes, sir, and hearing witnesses, and getting at the truth, as near as I could.” In other words, it took hearing the accounts of other people who were there to trigger Dr. Bowen’s memory, along with a week’s worth of conscious reconstruction, for Dr. Bowen to remember what happened, something that Knowlton accepted this with a generous amount of understanding.

In contrast, Knowlton did not offer Lizzie a single word of understanding during the inquest, and one would be hard-pressed to call how he treated her as respectful. When she would answer with “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember,” instead of accepting this answer as he did the others, he kept pushing and prodding her, insisting she try to remember, saying at one point, “You have not answered my question, and you will, if I have to put it to you all day!” Sometimes she would give in and try to come up with an answer, even if she had to resort to speculation (such as what she thought Abby may have been doing in the hours Lizzie didn’t see her). This usually resulted in seemingly ridiculous answers (maybe Abby was sewing), answers Knowlton openly scoffed at. He demanded explanations for the most mundane things, badgering her for a strangely long stretch over why she said she felt well enough to eat pears in the barn when she had earlier said she told Abby she didn’t feel well enough to eat at the noon meal.

But Knowlton’s most pernicious interrogation tactic—a tactic well-known for making suspects trip over their own words—was making her repeat parts of her story over and over. For example, he demanded five times over two days that Lizzie tell him about her conversation with Abby that morning. When she complied, he would pounce on every small variation. If she forgot a detail she had mentioned before (such as Abby telling her she’d already made the bed upstairs), he would make her start over. If she provided a new detail (such as recalling she asked Abby whether she planned to change her dress before she went out) he treated it with irritation, complaining she should have mentioned it earlier, then made her start over again.

Lizzie clearly struggled. When Knowlton asked her why she hesitated to answer a question, she told him, “I was trying to think if I was telling it as I should,” and “Some of your questions I have difficulty answering, because I don’t know just how you mean them.” When he told her she had changed her story about where she was when her father came home, she told him, “I don’t know what I have said. I have answered so many questions and I am so confused I don’t know one thing from another.” At one point, when he demanded of her, “Do you desire to give me information or not?” an overwhelmed Lizzie cried out, “I don’t know it! I don’t know what your name is!” But the district attorney did not relent.

Knowlton’s aggression toward Lizzie is the reason why Jennings told the judge at the preliminary hearing that the district attorney had “put her to the rack.” Knowlton, speaking right after Jennings, shrugged off the accusation by saying “I asked her where she was when her father came back … that’s the kind of thumbscrew I apply.”

Yet, many case observers at the time agreed with Jennings’ characterization. The most famous reporter at the trial, Joe Howard, wrote, “Pushed, examined, cross-questioned, surrounded by hostile officials, Lizzie was badgered and confused.” Even Victoria Lincoln, who believed Lizzie guilty, had to acknowledge that “dark legends of [Knowlton’s] brutality still hang heavy over the facts.” She herself preferred to give Knowlton credit for “inexhaustible patience;” although, in the same paragraph, she admitted that his patience was indeed exhausted at certain points and that he had, in a moment of frustration, acted callously by shooting rapid-fire questions at Lizzie about what she had noticed about her father’s mangled face.

For many, Lizzie’s inquest testimony is uncomfortable reading that elicits sympathy for Lizzie, and one cannot escape the irony that Knowlton is demanding that Lizzie be more open and honest with him even as he is making it painfully clear that he is her adversary and unsafe to trust. It is no wonder that Jordan wrote that in the courtroom, seeing Knowlton approach her sister on the witness stand made Lizzie “shrink back in her chair.” Or, that Pearson would assert that Lizzie “feared Mr. Knowlton as if he were the Day of Judgment and shuddered at the thought that he would ever question her again.”

Knowlton was clearly subjecting Lizzie to what Leo called “a guilt-presumptive accusatory interrogation;” however, thanks to our equally guilt-presumptive cultural bias against Lizzie, most readers tend to skim past the district attorney’s problematic interrogation techniques and focus instead on the problematic answers they elicited from his suspect.

The Making of a Liar

When Cara Robertson described Lizzie’s inquest testimony, she said, “At times it seemed Lizzie was deliberately tormenting Knowlton with a Yankee version of the rope-a-dope. He was forced to repeat questions or ask slightly rephrased versions about every subject covered. She answered questions as tersely as possible and, when caught in a contradiction, wiggled out of the bind by suggesting she had misunderstood the question. Or she digressed, answering in an elliptical and unresponsive manner. Overall, it was an infuriating performance.” Decades earlier, Pearson had described Lizzie’s testimony in much the same way, suggesting that Lizzie overflowed with one unbelievable story after the next (such as her roundabout account of why she was looking for iron to make sinkers), as if she was purposely overwhelming her interrogator with nonsense to distract and confuse him.

It can be baffling when case observers try to imbue Lizzie with the power to advance her own guilt-obscuring agenda even as they are accusing her of guilt-revealing behavior. The truth is, Lizzie did not overflow with anything at all at the inquest; her answers were relentlessly extracted from her by Knowlton, and her fear of saying the wrong thing was clear. The district attorney was the one choosing the questions, he was the one setting the agenda. Her attorney, George Robinson, would later characterize it as an attempt to wring incriminating statements out of her, and Knowlton’s tactics, such as making her repeat her version of events again and again, were textbook examples of how to make a suspect look like a liar.

Another effective tactic he employed was refusing to allow Lizzie to say, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember,” and force her to speculate. For example, Knowlton clearly wanted to determine if Lizzie was telling the truth about going up into the barn loft during Andrew’s murder and asked her what she was doing up there. She told him she had looked inside a “sort of a box” on a workbench for pieces of iron or lead.

Q: How large a box was it?

A: I could not tell you. It was probably covered up—with lumber, I think.

Q: Give me the best idea of the size of the box you can.

A: Well, I should say I don’t know. I have not any idea.

Q: Give me the best idea you have.

A: I have given you the best idea I have.

Q: What is the best idea you have?

A: About that large. (Measuring with her hands)

Q: That long?

A: Yes.

Q: How wide?

A: I don’t know.

Q: Give me the best idea you have.

A: Perhaps about as wide as it was long.

Q: How high?

A: It was not very high.

Q: About how high?

A: (Witness measures with her hands.)

Q: About twice the length of your forefinger?

A: I should think so. Not quite.

Lizzie plainly told Knowlton she didn’t have an accurate idea of the box’s size; perhaps it was a detail that had escaped her notice as she focused on what was inside the box. Yet, just as he did many times throughout his questioning, he continued to push her to come up with an answer, forcing her to guess. If her guess turned out to be wrong about the size, whether in height or width, he would have made her appear to be a liar even as she was attempting to be honest about her lack of memory. Ultimately, Lizzie was indeed wrong about the “sort of a box,” but the problem wasn’t the size, it was that it was not a wooden box at all, but a wicker basket that police found sitting on a workbench. (We have no idea the shape of the basket, it may have been square like a box.) Yet, inside the basket, found on a workbench atop the pile of lumber just as she remembered, were a number of the exact items she recalled seeing inside it and had described to Knowlton.

Still, whether the result of underhanded questioning tactics or not, many of Lizzie’s answers remained incriminating. Some sounded almost like the wobbly inventions of a confused child, while others sounding like the brazen lies of a killer trying to cover up her misdeeds. Yet, perhaps what most contributed to the impression of Lizzie spewing a fountain of falsehoods was how much her version of the morning of the murders contradicted Bridget’s version.

Lizzie vs. Bridget

Nearly every one of the dozens of books (and hundreds of articles and essays and blog posts) written about the Borden murders includes an account of events in the Borden household the morning of August 4th. This account is invariably based on what Bridget Sullivan told authorities she recalled happening. It is taken as fact that Bridget’s version of events is the objective truth of what happened, accurate in all its particulars.

One author, however, did not automatically accept Bridget’s version of events as a given, and questioned whether her memory might have been subject to error. In his 1961 book, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, award-winning crime journalist Edward Radin closely examined Bridget’s testimony at trial and pointed out some contradictions with others, such as her claim that Abby didn’t tell her to wash the windows until after John Morse had left, when Morse testified he’d heard Abby give her the instruction at breakfast. Radin also noted puzzling gaps in Bridget’s timeline in which, if the morning had unfolded as she claimed, it would have taken her a long while (from about 8 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.) to perform the simple task of washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen after breakfast (albeit with a ten-minute break to vomit), while the more complicated task of washing the outside windows would have taken less time (from 9:30 a.m. to about 10: 20 a.m.).

Radin was not the first to spot these problems in Bridget’s timeline. As early as Lizzie’s preliminary hearing, Andrew Jennings, in his closing argument to the judge, noted that no one ever asked Bridget to justify why it took her a supposed 20 minutes to “wash the upper part of one window” in the dining room. Jennings added that, according to Bridget’s story, she washed “only three and half windows” in the space of “three quarters of an hour.” Jennings made it clear that he didn’t believe that meant Bridget might be guilty of the murders (unlike Radin, who suggested she could have been), he was only pointing out the problem in police finding fault with Lizzie for being unable to perfectly account for her time, when Bridget could not do so either. (Bridget, herself, admitted a number of times on the stand that she did not have a good grasp of time that morning, saying she hadn’t been paying attention to the clock.)   

More recently, Borden scholar William Spencer laid out other problems with Bridget’s timeline in his second book on the case, Lizzie Borden Uncut: A Casebook of Theories. While Spencer believes Lizzie is guilty, he recognized that Bridget’s version of events, if true, complicates Lizzie’s brief window of opportunity to catch Abby in the guest room during the “two or three minutes” it would have taken her to perform the task she went upstairs to do. Spencer came up with “three possible scenarios” in which Lizzie as killer would match the events Bridget described and eventually concluded that Bridget had to be mistaken in at least some of her recollections. (For an in-depth look at Lizzie and Bridget’s two different versions of murder morning, see Abby’s Time of Death and Timelines)

So, if we accept that Bridget could have been inexact in her memory of the time and order of events, then suddenly at least some of the ways Lizzie’s version of the morning differed from Bridget’s do not necessarily look like falsehoods but simply the common experience of two people having different memories of the same mundane events. Lizzie remembered seeing Bridget gathering bucket and pail to wash the windows when she first came downstairs; Bridget recalled gathering the equipment later, after Lizzie had finished breakfast. Knowlton, however, made it clear while questioning Lizzie that he would not accept any other version of events other than that given to him by Bridget. When Lizzie said she didn’t recall seeing Bridget washing windows in the dining room after Andrew’s return, even though Bridget had described a conversation with Lizzie while she was ironing in that room, rather than consider that one or both women may not have been paying close attention to each other when they crossed paths, Knowlton rejected Lizzie’s memory completely. “It is certain beyond reasonable doubt [Bridget] was engaged in washing the windows in the dining room or sitting room when your father came home,” said Knowlton to Lizzie. “Do you mean to say you know nothing of either of those operations?”

Lizzie still would not say she had seen Bridget in the dining room at that time but weakly offered, “I might have been in the same room and not seen her.” Sticking to her own memory, rather than accepting Bridget’s, only made her look as if she’d been caught in a lie. But Lizzie had no idea what Bridget had told Knowlton in her own inquest appearance and thus had no idea that she was contradicting Bridget’s story. So, whether Lizzie’s memory was right or wrong, at the time of the inquest it seems likely she was being truthful about what she remembered doing after Andrew returned home.

Yet, today, just as in 1892, when Lizzie and Bridget’s stories differ, Bridget gets the benefit of the doubt, Lizzie does not. If Bridget did happen to be wrong about something, as seems probable (at least in the timing of when Abby told her to wash windows), it is understood as a lapse in memory, an honest mistake. But if Lizzie is wrong, it is considered to be a bald-faced lie. Even when those so-called lies were about what Lincoln and Elizabeth Jordan called “trifling” matters that had nothing to do with the murders (such as the time she started ironing), Lizzie has rarely been allowed an honest mistake but has been perceived to be making stuff up willy-nilly, because she couldn’t keep track of the stuff she earlier made up willy-nilly to cover her guilt.

Of course, Lizzie did eventually hear Bridget’s version of the murder morning at the preliminary hearing and would have realized at that point that Bridget’s account was substantially different than her own. As Bridget told the same account at the jury trial without a vigorous cross-examination by Lizzie’s attorneys challenging her on the details, it’s likely Lizzie did not dispute Bridget’s version to her lawyers. Which does not necessarily mean that Lizzie was being untruthful when she spoke to Knowlton. Of course, it could mean exactly that, but as Jennings and Robinson by all accounts believed Lizzie innocent, it seems more likely that at the time of the inquest she truly did not remember talking to Bridget in the dining room. Perhaps there was nothing in the conversation significant enough to her to commit it to memory, or perhaps facing an overbearing district attorney at the inquest put her in such a stressed and adrenalized state that it made her mind go blank. (Anyone who has been paralyzed by a public speaking situation knows how easily this can happen.) Or perhaps, like Dr. Bowen explained at the preliminary hearing on his own experience of having to reconstruct events, she needed to hear the accounts of other witnesses to trigger her memory of what happened.

If that was the case, one can imagine that hearing Bridget’s version in the courtroom would have sparked her memory and she would have known that Bridget was right about their conversation in the dining room. Imagine how great her chagrin to realize that her memory had failed her at the all-important inquest, and how difficult it must have been to explain it to her sister, her friends, her ministers, her attorneys. One would expect that her attorneys, being human and subject to memory gaps in times of stress as we all are, would have understood (just as Knowlton understood the memory gaps of his own witnesses). They also would have been determined to make sure an innocent memory fail could not be used against her by a prosecution team equally determined to prove her guilty. The only problem with their successful effort to have her inquest testimony ruled inadmissible is that it left them with no ability to correct the record in court. Her erroneous words at the inquest would stand; that is, unless Lizzie cared to speak to reporters and correct the record herself. But she never did that.

Of course, this is all supposition, there is no way to know for certain whether Lizzie believed she was being truthful with Knowlton or if she was indeed lying her face off as so many presume (see Lies). But, as Radin asked, “Think whatever you wish of Lizzie Borden, think that she is the killer of her father and stepmother, but can you produce a single reason why she should have lied about what Bridget was doing when Lizzie came down that morning? Lizzie had absolutely nothing to gain by lying about this. It would have been pointless for her to make up a story about the brushes and a pail of water. In fact, Lizzie’s story made the case against herself even stronger by placing Bridget outside even earlier,” thus giving Lizzie more time and opportunity to commit Abby’s murder.

The same can be said for the conversation Bridget testified to having with Lizzie in the dining room while Lizzie was ironing. It would have mattered not at all to either her guilt or innocence whether she was ironing handkerchiefs in the dining room or not, so why deny it and make herself look like a liar? Or, why deny that after she found Andrew’s body and the house began filling with people that she had said of Abby, “I thought I heard her come in?” Three different people heard her say it. Yet, again and again Lizzie denied saying things that multiple witnesses heard her say, things that would have had no bearing on guilt or innocence. Yes, Lizzie was likely stressed by the hostile way she was being interrogated at the inquest, and that was almost certainly a mitigating factor, but she denied saying or doing so much of what numerous people agreed she said and did that it’s almost as if her memory had been wiped clean.

Because it makes so little sense that Lizzie—even if she had committed the murders, or even especially if she had committed the murders—would so carelessly paint a picture of herself as a liar, Kat Koorey writes in The Hatchet that “it is even more important to study her ordeal upon the stand, and surmise if there was any underlying reason which might explain at least some of her more evasive answers.” Koorey points to the much-discussed prescription of morphine that Dr. Bowen had provided Lizzie “to help her withstand such an onslaught to her sensibilities,” and added that “it is believed that these drugs directly resulted in her odd and unrealistic answers in the official inquiry.” A number of reporters at the trial seemed to accept this explanation, with Joe Howard writing about her “befogged condition as a result of morphine.”

The morphine hypothesis isn’t a bad theory, and it may have indeed contributed to a “befogged condition,” but Lizzie was given the morphine for nighttime use, to help her sleep. Unless she decided not to use it at night and took it during the day while she was actively testifying on the stand (not inconceivable if she was feeling anxious about it), taking morphine before bed probably wouldn’t have compromised her ability to recall what happened the day of the murders. But there is something more powerful than a couple grains of morphine that impacts one’s ability to store memories. And it’s something that nearly everyone who showed up in the hour after Andrew’s murder was impacted by, something that Knowlton himself recognized as a factor that hindered memory: the shock to the brain delivered by trauma.

The Impact of Traumatic Shock

When John Morse testified at the inquest, he told the district attorney he didn’t notice much after he learned about the murders as “there was such an excitement, and I was nerved up.” Alice Russell also said she could not come up with clear memories of that afternoon, “I have a very confused idea of it. I have tried my best to have it clear … I don’t seem to remember what [Lizzie] said and done.” Mrs. Churchill’s testimony sounded much the same, “I’m sure I don’t remember what I said to anyone.” These were all people who did not discover Andrew’s body or live in the house as Lizzie did, yet just by being close to the experience they had trouble coming up with distinct memories of the day. Imagine how much greater the shock to Lizzie; the impact on her memory must have been considerable.

Psychologists tell us that when a traumatic event triggers a stress response, our cognitive resources are diverted toward instinctive survival mechanisms and away from higher-order thinking, making it much harder to organize one’s thoughts. The rapid onset of corticosteroid effects limits the function of the hippocampus, thus blocking the consolidation of explicit memory, and stimulates the amygdala, which enhances implicit sensory memory. Other memory systems also come into play, such as the salience network, which goes into overdrive and helps burn certain images into one’s memory at the cost of other memory systems, like working memory and memory retrieval.

This is why a person who has just gone through a traumatic shock might not have enough explicit memory at their disposal to remember a conversation they’d had afterward, exactly as Alice Russell and Dr. Bowen and others who testified at the inquest described; yet, certain other non-essential details from implicit memory will linger. Mrs. Bowen remembered how white Lizzie’s hands looked against her dark skirt. Officer Allen, the first police officer on the scene, remembered how thin Andrew’s ankles looked in his shoes. Likewise, we can be sure that the image of her father’s chopped up face would have burned itself into Lizzie’s memory (along with associated sounds and smells), but the conversations she took part in immediately thereafter may have been lost to her.

Even if a memory manages to get itself stored in the brain, it may still be difficult to retrieve. According to a 2022 paper published in the academic journal Neuron, the “cortical excitation and inhibition” from the onslaught of stress chemicals triggered by trauma leads to deficits in memory retrieval by reducing “neural activity in retrieval-related neural processing.” (Recall that Dr. Bowen testified it took him nearly a week to reconstruct his memory of events that morning.) The authors also note that there is a genetic component to how severe stress impacts the different parts of the brain, which means that there is not a uniform impact of stress on everyone, and some individuals “are particularly vulnerable to maladaptive stress effects on memory.” 

There is no doubt that after the intense stress of finding her father’s body, Lizzie Borden’s brain would have released a flood of chemicals that would have compromised her ability to consolidate clear memories of what happened that day. Add to that the stress of learning she was suspected of the crime, as well as the stress of being subjected to a belligerent interrogation over the course of three days at the inquest, it would not be surprising that her ability to retrieve her memories was also seriously impaired. Lizzie’s answers to Knowlton’s questions could speak less to falsehoods and more to the stress chemicals that turned her mind into a blank slate.

Mrs. Mary Brigham, Lizzie’s close friend, seemed to understand this when she gave an interview to a Boston Post reporter and shared her opinion of what Lizzie had been through. “Why, she was dazed and half fainting at the time she discovered her father’s body and says she could not [tell] a straight story of what took place. From that time on, her mind was in the same condition—dazed—that is the word. She was wrought up to the highest tension, in a constant state of ignorance of what was coming next. Whatever she may have said in that condition, would it be strange if it conflicted at times?”

Could Autism Have Been a Factor?

For anyone who may have wondered if Lizzie Borden—with her infamous “cool demeanor” and the many descriptions of her as “odd” and “peculiar”—may have been autistic, then reading Lizzie’s inquest transcript is likely to solidify the impression (it did for this writer). Lizzie’s testimony is a textbook example of “literal thinking,” a common trait in autism, in which an individual is more likely to interpret words and phrases exactly as spoken. People on the autism spectrum often struggle to grasp things like sarcasm or other kinds of figurative language. They can also have problems discerning what other people find obvious from the context of a conversation or from nonverbal cues like facial expressions and body language. Perhaps this is why Lizzie told Knowlton, “Some of your questions I have difficulty answering because I don’t know just how you mean them.”

Many writers on the Borden case have noticed the literal bent in Lizzie’s inquest testimony as well, even if they don’t recognize it as a classic sign of autism. Cara Roberston characterized Lizzie’s testimony as “odd,” explaining, “She answered Knowlton’s questions in the exact language they were asked, and didn’t elaborate even in instances where it would be exculpatory for her.”

An autistic person can continually frustrate the neurotypical person in conversation because of an inability to “get on the same page.” We see this clearly in Knowlton’s exchange with Lizzie about her alibi for Andrew’s murder and her claim she’d gone up into the barn to find a “piece of iron” to serve as a sinker for her fishing lines. The district attorney demanded she explain why she would look for material for a sinker in a hot barn on that particular day and asked a long series of questions. She took each question literally and then answered it literally, telling him all about her fishing lines at the farm in Swansea and how they did not have sinkers. When she eventually told him she did not plan fetch her lines at Swansea before her fishing trip to Marion, that she intended to buy new ones, Knowlton seemed ready to explode at what seemed to him (and to most neurotypical readers of the transcript) as an attempt to evade or obfuscate. If Lizzie was indeed autistic, his frustration must have confused her because in her mind she was answering his questions exactly as he put them to her.

Lizzie’s literal thinking is apparent in other places in her inquest testimony, including a long exchange in which Knowlton asks Lizzie where she thought Abby might have been during the morning hours. Lizzie volunteered nothing about the note she claimed Abby had received on the day of the murders, even though he already knew that had been her story in the hours after the murders. He knew she had said it to witnesses, to police officers, to Dr. Dolan, and yet she did not volunteer anything about a note there on the stand. That raises the suspicion of many observers, who usually conclude that she was trying to avoid talking about the note because she wanted to avoid talking about her whopper of a lie. But Lizzie readily brought up the note when specifically asked whether she supposed Abby could have left the house. Until then, Knowlton merely asked her what she thought Abby might have been doing if she’d been inside the house. Once again, we see she took his questions literally and answered them literally. (Another possibility is that her lawyer, Andrew Jennings, in an effort to protect her, may have instructed her not to volunteer anything and merely answer the questions put to her, and she may have thought she should stick to his advice to the letter, advice she would have taken even more literally if she was autistic.)

Another arrow pointing to autism is, as explored elsewhere in this encyclopedia, Lizzie’s demeanor, which the first police officers on the scene of the murders deemed too cool and unemotional for the situation. In autism, a lack of visible emotion is known as a “flat affect” or a “blunted affect.” Lizzie’s calm in the face of officers’ questions made them immediately suspicious of her, and it would seem the district attorney also found fault with it during the inquest. He afterward wrote a letter to Attorney General Pillsbury that mentioned two things besides her “inconsistencies” that made him believe her guilty of the murders, and one of them was “her manner.” He doesn’t define the manner that seemed so suspicious to him in his letter, but at the trial he repeatedly harped on Lizzie’s “icy demeanor.”

Those who have lived with an autistic person and have had to explain the demeanor of their loved one to others might recognize that exact sort of “neurotypical” judgment directed at Lizzie. What seems to be unusual behavior or way of speaking is in reality someone whose cognitive style simply works in a different way. Of course, even if she did have autism, it would not rule out her being guilty of the murders of her father and stepmother. Autism could even help explain why, if guilty, she seemed to be such a phenomenally bad liar at the inquest.

Autism expert Dennis Debbaut wrote a paper specifically for law enforcement officials which noted that while autistic people are known to be habitually honest and straightforward, when they do find reason to lie, they do a terrible job of it. “Persons with autism are concrete thinkers. Jokes, sarcasm, innuendo, satire, trickery, and deceit are challenging concepts for them to understand and appreciate. Their world is unadorned with pretext, pretense, sham, and dishonesty. They are naturally guileless and very honest. They are not very able liars.” One way or the other, autism could explain a lot about Lizzie’s inquest testimony. (For a closer look at the possibility that Lizzie was autistic, see Autism Theory.)

Author’s Take

The first time I read Lizzie’s inquest testimony, probably two decades ago, I cringed. It seemed obvious to me that Lizzie Borden was trying to dodge questions, dodging them so hard she was making herself ridiculous, as she smacked into the walls of her guilt. I didn’t even finish reading the entire thing. Other than perhaps her story of the note, I considered Lizzie’s words at the inquest to be the most convincing evidence that she had indeed killed Andrew and Abby.

In the intervening years, I have read through the inquest transcript numerous times, and my opinion has evolved. First, I noticed how much the way Lizzie answered Knowlton’s questions reminded me of the autistic people in my own life. Then I noticed that other witnesses were answering with plenty of “I don’t know” answers, just like Lizzie, only they were allowed by the district attorney to have gaps in their memories, and Lizzie wasn’t. Then I started becoming curious about why Lizzie would “lie” about so many small things not worth lying about, and learned more about the impact of tramatic shock …

Today Lizzie’s inquest testimony looks quite different to me. That is the nature of this mysterious document; we look into it as we might look into a crystal ball or a cup of tea leaves, hoping to see a definitive answer to the question “did she or didn’t she?” Mostly, what we end up seeing is a reflection of what we already believe about her guilt or innocence. Take Victoria Lincoln, who spent a good chunk of A Private Disgrace delving into Lizzie’s words at the inquest and assigning the most ill-fitting meanings to Lizzie’s testimony in order to make it fit her own whimsical theory of the crime. I was left mystified and blinking at her conclusions. So, I often wonder if that is what I am doing here, grabbing at justifications for Lizzie’s poor performance like jewels to embed in the crown of innocence I sometimes long to place on her head.

It would be naïve of me to think that just because I now know more about the negative outcomes of aggressive police interrogation techniques, or the impact of traumatic shock on memory, that all the inconsistencies and contradictions in her answers to Knowlton can be dismissed. Her dissembling testimony remains unsettling for me. Yet, I no longer take it at face value, nor do I accept it, as so many do, as evidence of Lizzie fumbling badly at covering up her guilt. There was clearly more going on beneath the surface. And while taking the context and mitigating factors of her words into account doesn’t necessarily make them point to innocence, they no longer point firmly in the direction of guilt for me.

Yes, Lizzie’s story changes, as would the story of anyone lost in an uncertain sea of events beyond her ken. She speaks what she seems to believe is right, and when given a prompt that tells her she may not be remembering correctly, she sticks to what she believes in that moment to be true, even when it makes no sense to the listener or contradicts something she said before. Governor Robinson was probably onto something when he told the jury, “They say a story is true because told all times alike, but those of us that have dealings with witnesses in Court know that witnesses who tell the truth often have slight variations in their stories and we have learned to suspect the ones that get off their testimony like parrots, as if they had learned it by heart.”

Now, I don’t really know if it’s true that real memories remain consistent, there seems to be a debate even among modern experts about whether a guilty suspect is more likely to have a varying account or to stick to a solid, rehearsed story (see Lies). What I do know is that memory is malleable, and my own memories after shocking events are messy and sometimes at odds with others who were there. I also know that being badgered by anyone questioning me makes me freeze up and trip over my words. And I know that testimony gained from what was basically a hostage situation/torture session is not reliable testimony.

I also think it’s too bad that the inquest provides us with the only version of Lizzie’s story that we have available to us today, a story hammered out of a traumatized person by a hostile district attorney who clearly disbelieved everything she said. We don’t know Lizzie’s actual story, how she might have explained the events of the day to her sister, her friends, her ministers, her lawyers—people with whom she felt safe, people willing to listen to her and give her the benefit of the doubt. I can see why she gave up on trying to tell her story officially, whether to police, or to reporters. Aggressive, guilt-presumptive questioning is not a good way to get accurate information from a witness (the supposed reason to hold the inquest), but it turns out to be a great way to make a suspect look like a guilty liar.

I do wonder how events may have unfolded if the district attorney had not treated Lizzie with the heavy presumption of guilt and had questioned her respectfully as he did the others, as if he was talking to someone with the ability to give him helpful information. Would her answers have come out differently? What if he hadn’t asked her so many questions about trivial things like why she decided to eat pears and instead asked her more about people who had been to the house to do business with Andrew? Would she have been able to give him the kind of information she presumably showed up to provide and produced clues that police could have used to identify other suspects?

On the flip side, if Knowlton had been less overtly prejudiced against her, would the judges at trial have been so quick to recognize her testimony as involuntary and rule it inadmissible? If a jury had been allowed to hear her words, would they have been better able to discern her guilt? I cannot help but think if the district attorney hadn’t played such an aggressive game of “gotcha” with Lizzie and had questioned her with more care and genuine curiosity, then perhaps the person who killed Andrew and Abby Borden, whether it was Lizzie who committed the crime or someone else, would have been brought to justice.