Intruder Theory

When a defendant stands up in court and pleads “not guilty” to murder, that immediately creates two theories of the crime. The prosecution then tries to prove its theory, which, in the case of the Borden murders, was that Lizzie Borden killed her father and stepmother with a hatchet. Meanwhile, the defense attempts to discredit the prosecution’s theory, and will often suggest a theory of its own, which, in this case, was that an unknown intruder was the perpetrator of the crime. Lizzie’s attorneys made it clear to the jury that their job was not to identify who killed Andrew and Abby Borden (that was the job of the police), their purpose was only to prove that Lizzie did not commit the murders, which they ably did to the jury’s satisfaction, winning for Lizzie their verdict of “not guilty.” But outside the courtroom, the two theories were (and still are) inextricably knotted together: If Lizzie didn’t do it, then an intruder must have. If an intruder couldn’t have, then Lizzie must have.

Yet, for those who found it equally impossible to wrap their minds around the idea of the Lizzie they knew and admired suddenly rising-up without provocation to butcher her parents, they had no choice but to accept that an intruder somehow pulled it off. Yes, it was difficult to credit; even Lizzie (through her friend Mary Brigham) expressed “astonishment” that such an improbable thing had happened. If Lizzie’s supporters couldn’t quite explain how an intruder had done it, that didn’t mean the police were absolved from figuring it out, a point which Andrew Jennings, Lizzie’s attorney, emphasized in his closing argument at the preliminary hearing.

“It becomes the duty of the Commonwealth to investigate an atrocious crime like this with the greatest care,” said Jennings. “It is of the utmost importance that the guilty party should be found and not someone accused of it.” He disapprovingly added that “the Commonwealth seems to have made up its mind that the crime was committed by someone in that house. All their labors have been directed with that view.” The prosecution’s strategy, he said, was clear: they intended “to draw a line around the people in the house [in order] to isolate the house,” and thereby create an illusion of exclusive opportunity for Lizzie. From the perspective of the defense, there was no exclusive opportunity, and police had shirked their duty to the victims by too-quickly ruling out an intruder.

Edmund Pearson, writing forty years later, waved a dismissive hand at the idea of an intruder. “Who this mysterious murderer was, whence he came, why he killed Mrs. Borden, where he went, how he concealed the incriminating weapon—upon all these points, theorists are silent.” Setting aside the logic error in the assumption that if an intruder could not be identified then he must not have existed, Pearson does makes a valid argument that because no alleged intruder was ever apprehended, Lizzie’s verdict of “not guilty” did not wash away the grime of suspicion that clung to her when she stepped out of the courtroom and moved on with her life. The murders remain unsolved to this day and, without another suspect to focus on, or at least a viable theory of how an intruder could have accomplished it, Lizzie is still left holding the hatchet in the eyes of history. Yet, is this a justifiable conclusion? How difficult would it have been for an intruder to get into that house in reality?

A House Locked Tight

As Knowlton and almost everyone else who has written on the case has noted, the Borden family paid an unusual amount of attention to the security of their household. Second Street was a busy thoroughfare with its mix of residences and businesses near the heart of downtown, and Andrew Borden clearly did not feel it to be a safe neighborhood. He had barbed wire installed both atop and at the foot of the back fence; meanwhile, all the doors of entry (front, side, and cellar) to the house were kept locked and habitually re-locked every time someone went in or out. Even inside the house, the attic rooms, the clothes closet, and the bedroom doors of both Andrew and Abby, and Lizzie and Emma, were kept locked tight when their inhabitants were not in them. Andrew also kept a heavy knobbed stick under his bed, presumably in case anyone untoward gained entry.

Yet even with all the attention the family paid to security, the house, as Jennings was quick to remind the court, had been burglarized with all the inhabitants at home in June 1891, the year before the murders, and the barn broken into twice in the months leading up to the murders. Furthermore, the week before the murders Lizzie wrote to her sister that she had seen a man lurking on the back steps of the house when she came home after dark; the man had jumped up at seeing Lizzie and disappeared into the backyard. It wasn’t the first time she had seen shadowy figures hanging around the house, either. She told Knowlton at the inquest that she had seen something similar the winter before, a man lurking in the shadows around the house, an incident she said she relayed to her father.

Certainly, such events must have added to the unease of the household. Perhaps that is one reason why, when the family became miserably sick on the evening of August 2nd, two days before the murders, the Borden women were immediately suspicious that foul play was responsible. First, Abby went across the street to Dr. Bowen to tell him she believed the family had been poisoned. That same evening, Lizzie went to her friend Alice Russell’s house to tell her she also suspected they had been poisoned. Furthermore, the women didn’t think they were being targeted randomly, or at least Lizzie didn’t. She told Alice she worried someone was targeting Andrew Borden in particular.  (For more on the important question of who this mysterious someone targeting Andrew could have been, and what police did and didn’t do to identify him, see Intruder Theory: Andrew’s Enemies.) 

How and When Could an Intruder Have Gotten Inside?

In their case against Lizzie, the prosecution ignored the precedent of the burglary at the home the year before; instead, they hammered on the many obstacles to an intruder being able to come and go unnoticed from the Borden house. First, there were the habitually locked doors: a cellar door that was always kept locked (except for laundry days) and a front door that was triple-locked the entire morning of August 4th, as confirmed by George Allen, the first officer on the scene, and acknowledged by Lizzie herself. Not even Andrew could get into the house that morning when he came back from his business downtown; Bridget had to let him inside the front door after he had given up on the side/rear door with its locked screen. (According to Officer Joseph Hyde, when he asked Bridget if she had triple locked the door again after she let Andrew in, she said she didn’t recall doing so; she left the locking of the door up to Andrew. Which means Andrew must have turned the bolt and key as well, although it is curious why he would do so when the front door was typically kept locked only with the automatic spring lock during the day (see Locked Doors).

Second, while some of the windows may have been unlocked—it being the middle of summer when windows were frequently left open—Bridget had closed the windows on the bottom floor in order to wash them. Plus, those windows were so high from the ground that no one could reasonably climb up and gain entry to the house through them anyway. Meanwhile, the cellar windows that could be reached were all barred except for the window through which coal was delivered and which opened only into a dirty black coal bin. (Witness statements do reveal an unexpected call to police by Emma six weeks after the murders to point them to a broken cellar window. In the report written by Officer Albert Chase, “I found one light of glass broke in the upper sash; the lower sash had the appearance of being pushed in and raised up about five inches.”)

Third, there were neighbors at their own windows, many of which looked out over the Borden house, as well as numerous passersby moving back and forth on the busy street in front of it. Several of those passersby would report seeing “strange” men lingering near the house that morning, which the police did their best to track down; but, of course, no one reported seeing a blood-spattered man walking away with a hatchet in hand. Police eventually declared that these sightings led them to either reasonable explanations or to fruitless dead ends. Any loiterers who had been noticed but could not be identified were shrugged off as immaterial. The prosecution thus settled on a strategy of calling witness after witness who had been in the area throughout the morning to swear they had seen no one unfamiliar either coming or going into the house or yard at all.

In a well-researched 2008 article for The Hatchet called “The Sentinels of Second Street,” Mary Elizabeth Naugle lists all the witnesses police established who could see the Borden house from their own houses on Second Street or nearby. While not all these witnesses were called to the stand, a number were, and those who weren’t gave their statements to police, as did another dozen others who were out and about on Second Street that day.

From early that morning to the discovery [of the bodies], men such as John Crowe, John Denny, and others were busy at the Crowe’s lot site. A suspicious man sighted on the fence and woodpile at the back of the Borden yard turned out to be Patrick McGowan, taking a break to eat some pears.

Lucy Collet claimed to have stood guard at Chagnon’s from 10:50 … [which] means she could not have seen the arrival of a killer—only the departure and only if the killer escaped on the south side of the house. Aruba Kirby, however, who lived to the north of Chagnon’s, insisted that she saw and heard nothing from that way either, even though she was in the kitchen and sink room all morning. The houses flanking the Borden’s were likewise well covered. Mary, the Kelly maid, was working in the Kelly yard that morning, and Mrs. Kelly was observant enough to have noticed Andrew holding a small parcel and struggling with the front door about the time she left for a dentist’s appointment. She could not have witnessed an escape but might have noticed suspicious entry. 

Three women were at the Churchill house: Mrs. Gormley, a visitor, heard nothing out the open window; Mrs. Churchill, who was out but briefly to Hudner’s Market, … saw nothing unusual; and Mrs. Buffinton, mother of Mrs. Churchill, who was trundling a sick baby back and forth in the dining room and also noticed nothing. Across the street … Mrs. Bowen was watching for her daughter from the parlor window facing Second Street. She decided to give it up at 10:55.

Farther up the block at 81, Louis Hall stood before his office “for some time before eleven o’clock.” He claimed to “generally observe whoever is on the street and [was] most positive [he] would notice any suspicious character.”

While not one of the many people who were at home in the houses or yards surrounding the Borden property saw anyone they felt to be “suspicious” entering or leaving the Borden yard, let alone the house, it was those reports of passersby about men lingering on the sidewalk right outside the house that were most interesting to the defense.

The most well-known of these was seen by Dr. Benjamin Handy, who described a pale-faced stranger who was soon dubbed by newspapers as  Dr. Handy’s Wild-Eyed-Man. Handy took the stand to say that as he was passing the Borden house in his carriage at about 10:30 a.m. he saw a “medium-sized young man of very pale complexion, with his eyes fixed on the side-walk, passing slowly towards the south,” who was “dressed in a light suit of clothes … well-dressed—collar and necktie.” Handy described him as “paler than common” and “acting strangely,” to the point Handy said, “I turned in my carriage to watch him as I drove by, to look at him.” He repeated that he was “walking very slowly, scarcely moving,” and that “he seemed to be either agitated or extremely weak, or confused, something of the kind,” although he didn’t believe the man to be intoxicated. Handy didn’t know him, but added, “I have a faint idea that I had seen him on Second Street some days before.” (Handy was so convinced this man had something to do with the murders that he went so far as to travel to Boston with a police officer to try to identify someone said to be him.)  

The defense next called Mrs. Delia Manley, who was walking down the street with a friend at a quarter to 10 a.m. The women stopped near the Borden house to admire some pond lilies in the back of a stopped carriage and when they stepped back up onto the sidewalk they noticed a man in “light colored clothes” standing at the Borden gate, with his elbow resting on the gatepost. The man looked straight at both women and was still standing there as they continued on their way. Meanwhile, Mark Chase, who owned a stable a few doors up from the Borden’s, was called by the defense to describe a horse and “box buggy” that he noticed sitting under the tree in front of the Borden house at about five or ten minutes before 11 a.m. He noticed a man wearing a “brown hat and a black coat” sitting in the buggy, faced away from him. (Victoria Lincoln, spinner of myths, would later claim that Chase said the buggy had been parked there for an hour; however, Chase testified he had no idea how long the buggy had been parked there and he didn’t notice when it left.)

In his closing, Lizzie’s attorney, Governor George Robinson, didn’t insist any of these people were the killer but thought perhaps the man seen loitering outside the house could have been serving as a lookout. “He was the man that stood outside, and the other man was inside at that same time, and they were looking out for each other. That is a very common thing to do.” But whether the killer had a lookout or not, these unknown persons might have seen something helpful to the case—if only the police had been able to find them. (Again, for more on what police did to identify and track down an intruder, see Intruder Theory: Andrew’s Enemies.)

Ultimately, even if no one was definitively seen on the Borden premises, there were people lingering within mere feet of the premises, some of them seeming out of place enough to draw attention. This begs the question, how much time would it have taken for someone to open the gate and slip into the yard, quickly move across the thirty feet from the north gate and step through the unhooked screen door? Fifteen seconds? Twenty seconds? Not even the prosecution suggested that neighbors were stationed for hours at their windows, continually keeping their eyes on the Borden yard. There were undoubtedly many stretches of time throughout the morning when an intruder could have strode into the Borden yard, or come over the back fence, without anyone the wiser.

In fact, it may have been easier than one might expect for an intruder to have made his way into that house. When we picture an intruder, we tend to imagine someone blithely walking up to the house and slipping inside unnoticed as if by a stroke of dumb luck. But the far more likely scenario would be that an intruder, if there was one—or perhaps one working with a lookout—was lying in wait nearby, carefully watching and waiting for the right moment. And eventually, he would have found that moment.

An Unlocked Point of Entry

At no time did the prosecution ever dispute that the side screen door to the Borden house, while the family usually kept locked with a hook, was unlocked for a good portion of the morning of the murders. An unwell Bridget had gone outside “for about 10 to 15 minutes” to vomit just before 9 a.m., just before Andrew left the house, and went out again to wash the windows a short while later, at about 9:30 a.m., leaving the screen unlocked for another 50 minutes. An intruder could have slipped inside during either of those timeframes. Yes, Bridget was in view of the side door at least part of the time, but not the entire time; she started her window washing on the opposite side of the house, washing the south windows and talking to the Kelly maid over the fence. She also spent part of the time washing the parlor windows at the front of the house, which would have allowed an intruder to slip inside if he came over the back fence (or was perhaps lying low in the barn, maybe even studying the house from the window of the barn loft). Bridget herself agreed that “of course” an intruder could have gone through the screen door while she was washing windows on the other side of the house. So, getting inside was actually not the problem.

If the intruder had been somewhere near the house, watching, and had seen Andrew walk off, and had also seen Bridget in the back yard, he could have quickly walked to the door and stepped inside, perhaps with some excuse ready in case he ran into either Lizzie or Abby. As Robinson suggested in a theory he presented to the jury in his closing, seeing no one in the kitchen—just as Bridget herself saw no one in the kitchen when she came back in from seeing sick—he then could have made his way to the parlor to hide, or more likely, he would have moved quietly up the stairs to the guest room to secrete himself. That, in Robinson’s theory, was when he unexpectedly ran into Abby, who had just finished putting pillow shams on the bed. (In The Jennings Journals, Charles Sawyer recalled, “There was a yard stick (close) within a foot of her body, almost under the bed … [as if] she had been using it to smooth over the bed and had it in her hand to go out the door.”) Having stumbled into a witness upstairs, surely to the unpleasant surprise of them both, where no ready excuse would have been believed, the intruder must have felt he had no choice but to silence Abby, especially if he was someone she knew or recognized from previous trips to the home. He would have killed her, then closed the door to prevent being discovered. (Lizzie said the door was shut when she went by it that morning.)

The same scenario would work if the intruder had waited until after Bridget went outside to wash windows and was busy getting water in the barn or had gone to the opposite side of the house. But the timing wouldn’t work quite as well there, as Abby presumably went up to change pillow shams before Bridget went outside. Bridget testified that Abby was nowhere to be seen downstairs as she was closing-up the windows in the sitting room and dining rooms (see Abby’s Time of Death). Plus, by the time Bridget began washing windows, Lizzie was presumably back in the kitchen, getting started on her morning task, sprinkling her handkerchiefs and heating flat irons on the stove. So, unless Bridget misremembered the time she last saw Abby and went outside, if an intruder did indeed gain entry to the house and murdered Abby in the guest room, he most likely made his way in just after Andrew left and while Bridget was still out back emptying her stomach.

One objection to the idea of an intruder watching Andrew leave before sneaking into the house is the question why would an intruder bother to sneak in at all if his target had just left the house? It is an obvious question, but it also has an obvious answer. Someone determined to kill Andrew without being seen was not going to attack him on the street or place of business, where others would certainly witness the event. Nor would he knock on the door or push his way inside, where he would only encounter a prepared Andrew. He would do much better to ambush Andrew in his own home, catch him unaware, and take down anyone who got in his way. In fact, if someone wanted Andrew Borden dead, the only way to kill him and get away with it was probably to invade his home by stealth and literally catch him napping. (Although, a clever forum poster made the case that catching Andrew in the barn while visiting the privy would have been a much smarter strategy, and there is no arguing that.)

A still more common objection is that an intruder would not possibly know the layout of the house or the habits of the family, knowledge that would have been necessary to be able not only to get into the house but particularly to be able to hide within its walls undetected for an hour-and-a-half. At first glance, this argument seems to rule out an intruder (it did for this writer), but when we look more closely at how often Andrew invited men into his house to speak with him for business purposes, we see that any number of people may have been familiar with the layout.

Where Could an Intruder Have Hidden Once Inside the House?

When Lizzie was asked by police on the day of the murders who might have had a problem with her father, she told them about a recent visitor to the house, an Englishman who wanted to rent a storefront from Andrew (a rum shop, according to one paper). The two of them, said Lizzie, argued loudly before Andrew ordered him out of the house. We also know from the testimony of Jonathan Clegg, a new tenant at the Andrew J. Borden building, that just a few days before the murders, he had gone to the Borden House to speak to his new landlord. As everyone in Fall River knew, Andrew Borden conducted business inside his home.

“Now suppose,” said Robinson in his closing, “the assassin came there, and I have shown you he could without question, the house was all open on the north side, and suppose he came there and passed through. Suppose Lizzie was upstairs, suppose she was downstairs in the cellar. He passed through. Where could he go? Plenty of places. He could go upstairs into the spare room, right up the front stairs and go in there; he could go into that hall closet where you opened it and looked in, and where two men can go and stand; he could go into the sitting room closet; he could go into the pantry there in the kitchen, you saw that. He could go into various places.”

Another obvious hiding place in the house evidently favored by the Borden sisters was the parlor. Lizzie’s close friend, Mrs. Mary Brigham, in her August 20 interview with the Boston Post, said as much.

“I know that Lizzie herself has often spoken to her mother about the arrangement of the rooms and halls of the house, and how anyone might come in and go all over the house without anyone knowing it. Members of the family have often done so and spoken of it. The house is a very solid old building and any noise or jar is not easily heard. A man could have entered by the cellar way or the side door, gone up stairs and killed Mrs. Borden and afterwards gone down and hidden in the parlor, which was rarely entered by any of the family.”

Mary Brigham’s statement also addresses the common question of why, if a murdering intruder was in the house for over an hour, Lizzie didn’t hear anyone moving about the house as she was ironing and reading in the kitchen. Again, there is the precedent of the 1891 burglary, in which the inhabitants were home and heard no one come inside and make his way up into Andrew and Abby’s room to rifle through his desk. And, while the prosecution made much of the fact that Bridget said that she could hear the screen door slam from upstairs in her room if someone wasn’t careful, she more often declared being unaware of many things going on in the house, even when she was working in the next room, frequently using phrases such as “I don’t know anything of it.” For example, John Morse spent the first hour of murder morning in the sitting room, talking to Andrew and Abby, and Bridget, making breakfast just beyond the closed door to the kitchen, said she knew nothing of where he was until he sat down to breakfast. Clearly, Lizzie could have been sitting in the kitchen a good part of the morning and have no idea that an intruder was lurking in another room.

Still, many find it hard to believe that a murderer would have killed Abby, left her butchered body lying there on the floor, then stayed hidden in the house for over an hour, waiting for Andrew’s return, with so many unknowns to navigate. The risk of being discovered would have been prohibitively reckless, not to mention unbearably stressful and, as one Lizzie forum poster put it, “would take an implausible amount of nerve.” Yet, the same poster had no doubt that Lizzie had managed that very feat, killed Abby and left her lying where she fell, with similar unknowns to navigate and no way to be certain that Abby’s body would not be found by Bridget or Andrew. True, Lizzie wouldn’t have had to hide in the house, but she would have had a different kind of stress, equally unbearable: Appearing before Bridget and Andrew and having to “act normal” so as not to arouse their suspicion. It seems no more implausible for an unassuming Sunday school teacher to work up the nerve stay in the house after butchering her stepmother, then casually speak with her father and with the maid as she went about ironing handkerchiefs, all while waiting for her father to lie down for his nap so she could kill him as well.

Edmund Pearson, however, writing forty years after the crime, did not worry too much about the implausibility of someone patiently waiting an hour-and-a-half between murders. “It can only be said that [the killer] acted, as others have done, with great boldness—foolhardiness if you like. Although such daring in inconceivable to most of us cautious folk, that does not alter the fact that, every day in the year, crimes occur which are characterized by audacity … Criminals succeed in their plans because of their daring.” Ironically, he wrote these words about Lizzie, who he was certain was guilty, but they apply just as well, perhaps even better, to an intruder bent on murder.   

Yes, it is difficult to imagine an intruder being able to accomplish what the killer of the Bordens managed to accomplish without detection. Although, if he did manage to get into the house, he did not go entirely undetected. At least one person obviously saw him; Abby Borden, however, did not live long enough to tell the tale.

How Could an Intruder Have Left Without Being Seen?

Getting into the house unnoticed and staying hidden in the house for over an hour without being seen by Lizzie were not the only obstacles an intruder would have faced in pulling off a double murder without being caught. He then would have had to escape the house, presumably with blood evidence on his person and a bloody hatchet in hand, also without anyone on the busy street noticing. Again, this strains credulity, and Victoria Lincoln rightfully chides Lizzie’s defenders who say that Lizzie “could not have committed the murders without getting herself drenched in gore; while the mad maniac, hatchet in hand, would have been so tidy as to attract no attention.”

Lincoln makes a good point, but to be fair, the mad maniac had only to risk being seen for the amount of time it took to get out of the yard. With dark enough clothing and a few swipes of a handkerchief to remove the worst of the blood, along with a fold in his coat to conceal the weapon, he would have been home free in only a minute or two, ready to blend in with the busy flow of activity on Second Street (or perhaps Third Street if went over the back fence). The intruder would have been able to disappear, unlike Lizzie, who had to sit still under the eyes of a dozen witnesses, including policemen, for nearly an hour.

Furthermore, if one looks at the photographs of the Borden back yard taken by Arthur Phillips, an attorney working with the defense, with all the trees and shrubbery in full bloom as they would have been in August of 1892, one can see how shaded the yard was in full summer. The most popular photo of the Borden house was taken in winter, with the trees bare, and that photo does give the impression that the strip of yard by the back door was wide open and exposed to the sun.

However, on the day of the murders it was shaded in large patches by the lush summer foliage that grew thickly around the house. Thus, it would have been even more challenging to spot a figure moving rapidly along under dappled light in a short space of time, whether the intruder left the premises through the front gate or over the back fence.

There is no doubt it was possible for an intruder, having successfully killed Andrew while he was napping and Lizzie was busy up in the barn, to get over the back fence without being noticed. It was also possible for an intruder to simply walk out the front gate and unobtrusively step into the flow of activity on the busy street. In fact, it’s even possible any number of witnesses spotted him and yet failed to take note of him moving along. The witness statements taken by police show that of the nearly 20 people who lived or worked near the Bordens and claimed to have been outside on Second Street that morning, each and every one of them told police they “saw no one suspicious.” That phrase is repeated again and again in the police reports, but these interviewees certainly saw numerous people passing by who didn’t strike them as suspicious. Like the murderer in G.K. Chesterton’s short story, “The Invisible Man,” who remained unsuspected of his crime by moving along like an ordinary passerby, the killer of the Bordens may have become “invisible” to others even while in plain sight.

Through the Lens of Guilt

Within an hour or two of the Borden murders, the first police officers on the scene initially found themselves skeptical that an intruder could have gotten in and out of the Borden house unnoticed by its inhabitants, as well as unseen by anyone in surrounding houses or on the street. Within a few days, they were convinced there was no intruder. Beyond the daunting logistics of how an intruder could have pulled off two killings over an hour apart were other red flags that pointed to Lizzie’s guilt. For example, if a madman with a hatchet was in the house, waiting to attack Andrew, why kill only Abby, and not Lizzie or Bridget? One could make the argument that Bridget was outside most of the time, but Lizzie was inside, moving about the house, presumably putting the killer at risk of being discovered. A single scream from Lizzie would have been heard by neighbors or people on the street walking by open windows only a few feet away. So, why was Lizzie spared?

From there, more perplexing questions follow. If Lizzie believed a madman had just minutes earlier “cut up” her father (as she described it to Officer Fleet), why did she stay in the house? How could she have known the killer had left the house? Why didn’t she flee, run toward the street, call for help? And, if she was going to stay in the house, why did she call only for Bridget and not for Abby? She’d also left Bridget in the house when she went to the barn, so how could she be sure Bridget was still alive? Why didn’t she at least first call up to ask Bridget if she was okay? These unanswerable questions indicate that Lizzie did not perceive danger to herself after finding a freshly murdered man in her home because she knew she had nothing to fear from an intruder. She knew, because she herself was the killer.

Then of course, there was the problem of how a man who would assuredly have been spattered in blood and carrying a weapon out of the house was not noticed. As Knowlton summed it up in his closing: “If this mysterious and unknown assassin, who came into that house when there was no chance to get in, who hid in closets where there was  no blood found, who went from room to room where no trace of blood was found in the passageways or stairs, and who came out where there was no opportunity to come out without being seen by all the world; that unknown assassin, who knew all the ins and outs of that family, who knew that Bridget was going upstairs to sleep when she didn’t know it herself, who knew that Lizzie was going to the barn when she couldn’t have told it herself, who knew that Mrs. Borden would be up there dusting that room when no person could have foreseen it, who knew that he could get through and escape the eye of Lizzie and would find that screen door opportunely open at the exact time when it was possible for him to run in … that unknown assassin, with all that knowledge stored up in his head, which no human being could know, never would have carried away the bloody weapon with which this thing was done. Never. Never.”   

Through the lens of guilt, the intruder theory is completely irrational, a deus ex machina-style device of magical thinking. There is not one bit of evidence for it. The only evidence that exists, however circumstantial, points to Lizzie, and the intruder theory is nothing but a misguided attempt to build for her an escape from the consequences of her crimes.

Through the Lens of Innocence

Because of the inescapable binary telling us that if an intruder didn’t do it, then Lizzie must have, those who lean toward believing Lizzie innocent must address some of the logical problems that arise from an intruder theory. Most speculation about who this intruder might be assumes he was someone targeting Andrew who inadvertently ran into Abby in the upstairs guest room and thus was forced to kill her, too. Why Lizzie wasn’t killed as well is a question that demands an answer, even if we can only supply conjecture. It could be that Lizzie wasn’t attacked simply because she didn’t come across the killer as Abby had, and so didn’t force the hand of the killer as Abby had. It could also be that if the intruder had stalked Lizzie throughout the house and found her in the kitchen (where she claimed to be most of the morning), then left her lying dead in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, then when Andrew returned home and found his daughter dead he would not have lain down on the sofa for a nap, and it would have been more difficult for the killer to attack him unawares. Thus, killing Lizzie (or Bridget) would have made it more difficult for an intruder to accomplish his presumed mission. Once Andrew was dead, then anyone in the killer’s way would likely have been in danger of falling to his hatchet, but with Bridget upstairs and Lizzie out in the barn, he was free to walk out at will.

Why Lizzie didn’t flee the house is a good question but also seems to have a fairly obvious answer; Lizzie told several people that when she returned to the house the screen door was standing open, so it must have given her the impression someone had just left and thus the danger had passed. Either way, once she saw her father’s body she retreated to the back door after Bridget went off to fetch Dr. Bowen, which would have allowed her to easily escape if necessary. And that is where she stayed, at the back door, throughout the comings and goings of both Bridget and Mrs. Churchill. Once Bridget returned without Dr. Bowen, Lizzie immediately sent her back out again to fetch Alice Russell, crying out, “I can’t be alone in this house!” It wasn’t until Alice Russell arrived and urged her to sit down in the kitchen that Lizzie finally left the back entry. So, while Lizzie did not flee the house, she gave every indication she was uneasy remaining in it.

As for why she called for Bridget rather than Abby, Lizzie was clearly frantic that a doctor should come to her father’s aid. She would later say that she wasn’t sure if her father was dead or still alive, but she knew he needed help, and of course it would be Bridget that she would send on such an errand, and not Abby. She also admitted to being confused about whether Abby was still out as she supposed earlier, or if she had heard her come in. It’s also clear she was feeling some distress about Abby’s whereabouts, immediately telling Mrs. Churchill, “I don’t know but what Mrs. Borden is killed, too, for I thought I heard her come in,” and she several times asked others to look for her.

When it comes to the time gap between murders and the dubious possibility that a killer would have hung around the house waiting for Andrew’s return, there have been a number of known cases in which a killer has targeted a victim, slipped into their house and waited for them to return before killing them. There was Theodore Coneys, “The Denver Spiderman,” who in 1941 murdered a man in whose house he’d been hiding for an extended period, and the 1912 Villisca Axe Murders in Iowa, in which the killer was believed to have hidden in the attic as the family moved around the house and prepared for bed, then emerged after adults and children fell asleep to kill all eight of them with an axe. There was also Earle Nelson, who murdered his landlady in Portland, Oregon, in 1926, and stayed hidden in her attic for two days before killing a second person in the house. Clearly, a murderer hiding and lying in wait for his intended victim(s) has happened more than once, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that is what an intruder may have done in the Borden case.

None of this is to say that there weren’t numerous obstacles for an intruder to navigate, but while the prosecution contended that it was only Lizzie who possessed the “unhindered opportunity” to kill as she pleased, that is simply not so; Lizzie would have also had to deal with many of the same obstacles that an intruder faced, especially a lack of foreknowledge of who would be where at any given moment.

Lizzie vs. the Intruder: Who Faced the Bigger Hurdles?

When weighing the question of whether an intruder could have killed the Bordens, most people who look at the case consider the obstacles an intruder would have faced and simply end their inquiry there with a “no, not plausible.” In the words of Edwin Porter, writing in 1893, an intruder’s success would have required a “chain of circumstances which conspired to clear the way for the murderer so wonderful that its links baffled men’s understanding.” Rarely have case observers scrutinized the chain of circumstances that would have allowed Lizzie to succeed or the obstacles that would have been unique to her.

First, if Lizzie intended to kill her stepmother that day (and the prosecution was adamant that the murders were premeditated), how could she have planned for Abby to be upstairs in the guest room that morning, a room Abby rarely entered unless to use the sewing machine? John Morse’s overnight visit was unplanned and unexpected (and Lizzie asked neither her parents nor Bridget anything about it), and while Lizzie might have reason to expect her stepmother would be the one to go up the following morning to remake the bed, Abby had done the majority of that work before Lizzie even left her room that morning. Yes, once Lizzie came downstairs Abby then told her she planned to go back up to put shams on the pillows, but how could Lizzie know that Abby would go back upstairs after Andrew decided to leave for town and after Bridget stepped outdoors and out of earshot?  (For more on this conundrum, see Abby’s Time of Death.)  Lizzie couldn’t possibly have known ahead of time that Abby would be alone in that upstairs room at the very time the house would be empty of people.  

Beyond that, Abby was only going to be upstairs for a task that would take but a few minutes to finish. So, what was the prosecution’s theory? That Lizzie had a hatchet handy, perhaps hidden in her room, ready to whip out for whatever occasion Abby decided to go upstairs? Or, that she saw Abby go up and Bridget go out then hurried down to the cellar for a hatchet and raced back up to kill Abby before her stepmother could leave that room? If so, one wonders why, on learning of Abby’s plan to go back upstairs, Lizzie didn’t head back up to her room to wait for her chance to attack her stepmother but continued into the kitchen and, according to Bridget, sat down at the table for breakfast. One also wonders why, if she was about to commit murder, she didn’t hook the back screen door after Bridget went out to make sure the maid wouldn’t inconveniently come back in even though Bridget told her she was free to lock it.  

And what about John Morse? How could she know when her uncle might return to the house and/or need to go back upstairs to the room where he’d stayed the night before? If she was planning to kill Abby, it would seem Lizzie would be very curious about her uncle’s plans, but she showed no interest in him or his plans when he arrived the night before or when she got up the next morning. According to her inquest testimony, she didn’t bother to ask either Abby or Bridget about where he had gone or whether he would be coming back.

Furthermore, how could she know exactly when Andrew himself would return and what he might do when he got back? What if he had come home later than usual and decided he didn’t have time for a nap after all? Or, what if he decided not to nap on the sofa that day but thought he could sleep better up in his room behind a locked door? These were all variables that Lizzie couldn’t control and had no way of predicting. Whatever against-all-odds luck may have made it possible for an intruder to pull off the killings would, for the most part, have been required for Lizzie to pull it off, too.

One might even say it would have required even more luck for Lizzie to pull off the murders. If Lizzie had a true intent to kill her father and stepmother, what would she have done if Abby hadn’t gone back upstairs with pillow shams that morning? Would she instead have chased her stepmother through the house with a hatchet? Perhaps tried to corner her in some other room? Lured her into the parlor or attic on some pretense? Or would she have thrown up her hands and said, oh never mind about killing my parents? Certainly, Lizzie would not have been able to kill Andrew without Abby first unpredictably putting herself upstairs and out of sight for those crucial few minutes, during the rare and crucial circumstance of having no one else in the house—not Andrew, not Bridget, not Emma. If Lizzie did it, it seems impossible that she accomplished it through careful planning and premeditation; she must have done it on a momentary whim provided to her by extraordinary luck. (Of course, many in the Lizzie-is-guilty camp believe that is exactly what happened and say it helps explain her many odd choices in an effort to cover her tracks.) 

But an intruder wouldn’t have needed quite as much luck to succeed. An intruder wouldn’t need Abby to head up into the guest room with pillow shams in order to make it all work out right for him; he would be free to wing it, meet the circumstances, no matter what came up. Kill one, kill two, kill them all if necessary. Nor would an intruder have had to face Andrew and “act normal” after killing Abby. Nor would an intruder have had to face police in the hours and days afterwards and be forced to explain himself. Nor would an intruder have had to find a place to hide the weapon and sweat over whether it would be found. No, an intruder would have been able to make his own luck.

The one thing Lizzie would not have had to worry about was going in and out of the house unseen by neighbors or passersby, and so the prosecution leaned heavily into that at trial; hence, the parade of “didn’t-see-a-thing” witnesses near the house on August 4th. However, that surrounding wall of witnesses was not quite as solid as opening arguments made it appear. During the cross-examination of those witnesses by the defense, most said that while they didn’t specifically see anyone suspicious coming or going from the property, they had to concede it was possible for someone to go to or from the Borden house without their notice. For example, Lucy Collete admitted that she wouldn’t have seen anyone come over the Borden fence and walk through the orchard toward Third Street alongside where she sat on the piazza of the Chagnon house “unless they made a noise” that would cause her to look over.

More Arguments for Lizzie’s Innocence

The prosecution was adamant that an intruder could not have possibly gone in and out the house unseen by neighbors or passersby, as well as by the people in the house. Yet, they were equally adamant that Lizzie herself was able to go in and out of the house unseen by neighbors or passersby, as well as by the people within the house, on her supposed visit to D.R. Smith’s drug store the day before to try to purchase prussic acid. The jury ultimately didn’t hear that allegation because the judges ruled the prussic acid testimony inadmissible, but the question remains, how could the prosecution hope to rely on an argument for the impossibility of an action, then turn around and claim that same action was entirely possible the day before?

For many in the innocent camp, it is telling that Lizzie did not go out of her way to make the entrance of an intruder appear more believable. If, after dispatching her stepmother, Lizzie had an hour to plan her father’s murder, one would expect she would have done a better job of coming up with a story for police that didn’t so quickly seem to rule out an intruder—like saying she had been in her room the whole time, reading or sleeping, rather than hanging out downstairs near the only door an intruder might have used. One might also expect she’d have concocted some supporting evidence of an intruder’s entry, like simply unlocking the front door to give the intruder another avenue of entrance or exit, or perhaps making it look as if a robbery had occurred. (She would know how, at least if the guilty camp is right and Lizzie committed the “burglary” at the house the year before.) Or, if after killing Andrew, instead of immediately calling for help and proving herself to be in the right place at the right time, she might have left the house, walked downtown on some pretense of shopping and given herself an alibi while letting Bridget discover the body.

Yet, even with time to plan and premeditate, Lizzie did none of the things a guilty person might have done to hide her own culpability. She didn’t even bother to say she might have heard someone else moving around the house. (Although she did say she thought she heard Abby come inside, which has caused some to wonder if she heard the intruder after all.) Instead of any number of stories she might have told, Lizzie stuck to her inexact and sometimes self-contradictory account of being in the house and the barn, doing nothing much at all, and she kept sticking with it even when faced with doubt and disbelief from hostile interrogators. She also displayed what seemed to be genuine confusion about how someone could have gotten into the house. In his report, preserved in the Witness Statements, Officer Francis Edson said that the morning after the murders he overheard Lizzie asking Bridget if she was sure the cellar door had been locked the day before.

There is also a final bit of testimony at the trial that points to an intruder from one of the prosecution’s own medical experts. Dr. David Cheever, a professor of surgery at Harvard, took the stand and suggested that Abby Borden’s assailant was probably taller than Abby. While Cheever agreed with the other medical experts that the flap cut into Abby’s temple showed that first hatchet blow she took to the head was delivered while she was facing her attacker, Cheever said he believed Abby was given two blows on the crown of her head “before she fell;” in other words, while she was still standing. Lizzie was not meaningfully taller than Abby; but an intruder certainly could have been.

Still, the biggest argument for the intruder theory remains that it is the most logical way to explain why there was no blood seen on Lizzie mere minutes after Andrew was attacked with a hatchet so violently it left hundreds of drops of blood spattered on the walls around the room. It is also the most logical way to explain why a murder weapon was never found in or around the house, despite exhaustive searches by police officers. Some argue that having lived there for decades, Lizzie could have known a secret hiding spot big enough to hide a hatchet (and, presumably, a blood-spattered dress) that would elude police. But could she have really been certain such evidence would not be found? Wouldn’t hiding a hatchet, rather than just leaving it on the floor beside Andrew’s body, be putting herself at great risk of revealing the killings were an inside job? For many, it makes more sense to believe that the bloodied weapon was not found because an intruder committed the murders and carried it off with him.

Author’s Take

Governor Robinson, in his closing, spoke of the danger of a deciding on a guilty verdict against Lizzie “simply for the reason that you do not see how anybody else could do it. That is very dangerous ground.” It seems to me that many who reject the idea of an intruder based on its implausibility set-up camp on that dangerous ground. I have always been mystified by the presumption that if no one saw an intruder, then he simply didn’t exist. Or, if the police could not find him, he didn’t exist. As if what the police have the power to discern is the only reality. As if someone so determined to see Andrew dead that he would show up to his house with a hatchet and simply give up at seeing Bridget outside washing windows or be too timid to walk through an unhooked screen door. As if, once inside, the murderer would noisily clunk about the house so someone could hear, then afterward go running willy-nilly into the street, waving a bloody axe.

Yes, it is difficult to see how an intruder could have gotten in and out of the Borden house on that August morning unnoticed, then be able to coolly hide in the house for 90 minutes, risking discovery at any moment. But, of course, we armchair sleuths looking back are not ourselves murderers, so the motives and methods of an unknown intruder are inevitably a mystery to us. We simply have no idea what this unknown person may or may not have been capable of doing. As Knowlton himself pointed out during the trial, we cannot be expected to grasp “the craft of the assassin.”

What we do have is some sense of Lizzie; at least we have the words of people who knew her, and we also have the example of the life she lived before and after. I find it more difficult to assign murderous rage and incognito skills to Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden, who was known to be unfailingly kind and generous to others, than to an unknown intruder who may have killed a dozen times before. Although, I do admit there was no sign of such a man except one: The butchered bodies of Andrew and Abby, the people Lizzie had lived peaceably with for decades. 

However, not knowing how an intruder pulled it off doesn’t mean it’s not important to demonstrate how it could be possible, which is what I have tried to do in this entry. I don’t want to make the same error of logic that I believe the proponents of Lizzie’s guilt often make when they say it doesn’t matter if we can’t quite figure out how Lizzie managed to avoid leaving physical evidence of her crimes. I often cite John Henry Wigmore, the judge who in 1893 wrote a scathing criticism of Lizzie’s acquittal, and who said though it was difficult to see how Lizzie presented herself free of blood spatters mere minutes after the killings, that difficulty was beside the point. “These are difficulties of ignorance; in other words, there is no proved fact which is inconsistent with a thing being so; we merely cannot find traces of the exact modus operandi.” Basically, he was saying if one accepts Lizzie is guilty, it doesn’t matter if we can’t figure out how she got the blood off her. Ironically, Wigmore then discarded the possibility of an intruder, saying it was too difficult to imagine how such a person could have gotten in. For Wigmore, the difficulties of ignorance applied only to those things that got in the way of finding Lizzie guilty, and not to the things that may have led to concluding that she was innocent.

I don’t want to argue like Wigmore and say that because I believe Lizzie may have been innocent then the details of how an intruder could have managed it don’t matter. They do matter, and I do have a theory of my own that I sometimes entertain, a theory not all that different from the theory proposed by Governor Robinson in his closing. I can also imagine a man who experienced a conflict with Andrew that was so unacceptable to him, or so ruinous to him or his plans for something important to him, a man who knew Andrew well enough to have been inside his house and become familiar with habits. I can imagine this man using his anger and his knowledge to concoct a murderous scheme to find Andrew vulnerable and unaware, then lurking outside the house, watching and waiting, or, if wealthy enough, hiring someone to else to watch and wait for the opportunity to carry out his scheme. And when this man, or his hired assassin, saw Andrew take himself downstreet as Bridget was miserably heaving out in the back yard, he used the opportunity to slip inside the house, hatchet hidden in his coat, perhaps ready with some excuse for why he would be walking in the back door uninvited. But with no one in the kitchen, he did not have to do anything but find an out-of-the-way hiding place to await Andrew’s return. He then crept upstairs and stepped into the guest room only to find Abby unexpectedly there, smoothing out the bed covers. I can imagine the man did not hesitate, but struck down Abby with his hatchet, and when he was done with this grim work, he then closed the door to wait for Andrew’s return, prepared to kill again should anyone else discover him.

Now, like Robinson, I do not claim this theory to be what happened, because no one knows what happened. “You may adopt a theory just as well as I,” said Robinson. “You may find other theories, as I have no doubt you will as you look at the evidence. You will see other ways in which persons could enter that house by which the exclusive opportunity theory is overturned … A person can take one of those theories just as well as another, and one will harmonize as well as another.” From where I sit, an intruder theory that “harmonizes” with the evidence is no less plausible than the prosecution’s theory that Lizzie did the killings, a theory of the crime that is equally built on speculation and equally riddled with problematic holes.

Those firmly in the guilty camp might say sure, things like that happen in the movies—a killer just wanders into a house off the street and remains undetected—but stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life. In return, I would say that is only half-right. Yes, such things do happen in movies, as I know very well, having written many murder mysteries in my 20 year career as a screenwriter for television. But I have also written a dozen true crime movies, based on actual murders, movies that were produced, as well as researching and pitching a few dozen others based on actual murders that weren’t produced. And I have learned there is good reason for the oft-repeated adage that “truth is stranger than fiction.” Most every murder case that is interesting enough to be made into movie features elements that are odd and farfetched, elements that make people repeat the old cliché, “You can’t make this stuff up.”  

I don’t know if Lizzie was guilty or innocent; she very well could have killed her parents. What I do know from years of studying stranger-than-fiction murders is that it is entirely possible, and maybe even probable, that an intruder pulled it off.