Keys

Later, when police officers were searching Lizzie’s room, she warned them they wouldn’t find anything left by the killer because he wouldn’t have been able to get in; she kept her door locked when she wasn’t in the room and kept the key with her. And, when officers searched the rest of house, they had to ask for keys from Bridget and from Lizzie in order to get into closets and trunks. When they couldn’t get through the locked and barricaded door that connected Andrew’s and Lizzie’s bedrooms, they decided not to wait for a key and broke it open.  

Throughout the course of the trial, keys to various rooms were counted and tracked by the prosecution and, in the process, managed to create an impression that the house would have been a difficult place for an intruder to navigate. But while the jury did not find this characterization compelling enough to find Lizzie guilty of the murders, observers in the years since have focused on one key in particular during their arguments for Lizzie’s guilt.

Andrew’s Key on the Mantel

Bridget described in detail each time she noticed Andrew putting the key to his bedroom on the mantel of the sitting room or going back to retrieve it the morning of the murders. Overall, she described him making four distinct trips up and down the back stairs to his bedroom: three before his trip downtown, and one when he returned. Each time he had to veer into the sitting room to either grab his key or put it back.

Looking back on it, keeping a key to one’s bedroom on the mantel strikes many as eccentric behavior. Why lock the door if you are going to leave the key in plain sight? What did that mean? It was Victoria Lincoln, firmly convinced of Lizzie’s guilt, who believed she had finally figured it out, and she shared it with readers of her 1967 book. After the murders, Lizzie had been rumored to have staged the 1891 daytime burglary of the house that Andrew reported to police, and Lincoln concluded that must have been why Andrew started locking his bedroom door and placing the key on the mantel. He did this, said Lincoln, as an open rebuke of Lizzie; he was showing his daughter that he knew very well she had been the one to break into his bedroom and steal his belongings. By placing the key in plain sight, he was all but daring her to try again.

In reality, Andrew had long been locking his bedroom door. According to Emma, Andrew handed police the nail that he believed the thief used to pick the lock of his door, so clearly it had been locked when he left it. It’s doubtful he was locking any of his family members out, just as it’s doubtful Lizzie and Emma were locking out Abby and Andrew from the clothes closet upstairs that they kept secured. Andrew was locking out potential thieves who could possibly gain entry to the house, with good reason it turns out. It’s also possible he wanted to make sure that anyone he let into the house to discuss business wouldn’t wander upstairs and gain access to his private quarters. No one other than family would know what door the key on the mantel unlocked, and if Abby needed to go up to their room, she would know exactly where to find it.

Dealing in facts was not high on Victoria Lincoln’s list of priorities when she wrote her version of Lizzie’s story, but that hasn’t stopped her cynical interpretation of why Andrew put his key on the mantel from being accepted as “common knowledge” in the case against Lizzie. However, there is zero evidence Lincoln’s version is true; it’s merely another one of her creative fictions invented to help prop up her theory that Lizzie was the one who wielded the hatchet.

What Happened to Abby’s Key?

A more obscure mention of a key that presents an intriguing mystery to students of the case can be found in The Jennings Journals. The first mention is on pages 33 and 34:

Mrs. Dr. Bowen called & says that on the Tuesday before the murder she was walking up the street with Mrs. Borden & spoke of going over to the house & Mrs. B said Lizzie wasn’t up yet she didn’t think, but Mrs. Bowen had seen someone come away so she knew she was & went over there with Mrs. Borden — Mrs. Borden said she couldn’t get in the front way “for they had taken her key” so she & I went in by the backdoor.

From this journal entry, it appears that Mrs. Bowen personally told Andrew Jennings that an unspecified “they” had taken Abby’s key to the front door. It is also made clear that Mrs. Bowen “called,” meaning she went to his office specifically to tell him what she must have thought was important information for him to have. The entry does not note any other subject, so it would appear she made the trip to see Jennings just to relay this story. It would also appear that Jennings followed up on this story with Lizzie because later in his journal this entry appears:

Key — Mrs B told L she had lost her key — that last she saw of it a man was playing it — had it in his hand — took it from table —

While those who stumble across this mysterious tidbit in the Jennings Journals typically assume that Andrew was the “they” who took Abby’s key, the second entry makes it seem more likely that “they” referred to someone outside the family. Perhaps a male visitor had recently been invited to dine with the Bordens or had otherwise been allowed inside, and this man was fiddling with her key at either the dining table or kitchen table and then walked off with it. Frustratingly, there is nothing more about this story in the journals, so it is difficult to know whether it has any bearing on the murders whatsoever. Although the fact that Jennings bothered to record these snippets makes it appear that he was working on that question himself.

Perhaps Jennings dropped the subject because there was nothing more to be learned about it. Or, perhaps the unspecified “man” who walked off with Abby’s key was a man who secretly wanted Andrew Borden dead and had furtively slipped the key into his pocket so he could get back into the house at will and kill him. This is pure conjecture, but if Lizzie was in fact not guilty of the murders as her jury believed, then that mysteriously missing key might have been a lead that police could have explored. But of course, they didn’t do any such investigating, and the man who may have pocketed a key to the Borden house walked off into the unknown.