Laugh

News of this unexpected laugh jolted the public at the time and in the decades since has been much commented upon. Alexander Woolcott, writing in Vanity Fair in 1927, discussed this infamous laugh in his piece on Lizzie’s recent death. “To some who turn from time to time the yellowing pages of this fathomless New England tragedy, that solitary and enigmatic cackle floating down the darkened stairway lifts the Borden legend to the plane of Shakespeare and Sophocles.”

Whether Lizzie’s out-of-place laugh is the factor that elevates the tragedy of the Borden murders to the Shakespearean level is debatable (there are a number of more evocative details), but it does give the morning of August 4th yet another mystifying element that can (and has been) interpreted numerous ways. In the Lizzie-Is-Guilty camp, many see Lizzie much as Elizabeth Montgomery played her in The Legend of Lizzie Borden, standing at the top of the stairs, looking over at Abby’s body in the guest room, giggling with morbid glee as she waits to make her next kill. Meanwhile, in the Lizzie-Is-Innocent camp, her carefree laugh reveals that she had no idea that Abby was dead. If, said her attorney George Robinson, Lizzie had heard something funny, “why should she not laugh?” Her laughter, he implied, indicated innocence, because what kind of monster would laugh in the middle of committing two horrific killings?

Of course, Lizzie’s laugh is not proof of her innocence; we have seen many movie villains laugh maniacally, to the point it has reached satire. From a psychological perspective, a burst of laughter that Lizzie couldn’t control could fit with the absurdity of the axe murderess persona she had taken on and the crime she was allegedly in the midst of committing. Then again, Lizzie became infamous for her emotional self-control, so perhaps the laugh did point to Lizzie having nothing serious going on in her mind at that moment when she was surprised by hearing the maid curse.

One thing is certain, the laugh Bridget heard definitively placed Lizzie upstairs when her father rang the front doorbell. That means Lizzie was either mistaken, or lying, during her inquest testimony when she said she was in the kitchen when her father returned home. Why she would lie about this when Bridget could presumably tell police differently is puzzling. The prosecution pressed their theory that Lizzie was trying to remove herself from the vicinity of Abby’s dead body and made great efforts to convince the jury that anyone on the stairs would be able to see Abby’s body under the bed of the guest room. If Lizzie could convince the authorities she was downstairs, then she could more convincingly say she had no idea where Abby had gone. Most in the guilty camp agree with this explanation and may even add that Lizzie lurking at the top of the stairs tells us that she was up there “guarding” the guest room so that Abby’s body wouldn’t be discovered before she had a chance to dispatch Andrew.

In Lizzie’s defense, Robinson repeated the claim Lizzie made at the inquest, that the door to the guest room was closed when she passed it, so she would have not known Abby was lying dead in that room, only feet away. (Lizzie had said Abby told her she planned to shut it up after she made the bed “to keep the dust out.”) This closed door was an indication to Robinson that “the assassin” was hiding in that room with Abby’s body. But other than waving a dismissive hand toward the subject, saying it was “the commonest thing in the world for this young woman to pass up and down stairs to her room in the ordinary way of living,” he did not address why Lizzie would appear at the inquest and say she had been downstairs when Andrew returned home, when Bridget could say differently. But, of course, he didn’t have to, as he successfully fought to have her inquest testimony ruled inadmissible. (For a closer look at why Lizzie and Bridget’s version of the morning may have been so contradictory, see Inquest: Mitigating Factors.)

A century ago, with the cultural certainty of Lizzie’s guilt well settled, Lizzie’s laugh erupting in the middle of her alleged killing spree was often interpreted as a sign of the moral rot at her core. Today, it is more likely to strike people as a red flag for mental illness of one sort or another. People on Lizzie Borden message boards sometimes throw around terms like ‘emotional lability’ or ‘dysregulation’ or ‘neurological disorder’ in regard to her “inappropriate” laughter. Diagnosing Lizzie with a mental illness, or even moral rot for that matter, based on a single unexpected laugh is in itself laughable, especially as she showed no signs of either condition either before or after that day. However, one cannot blame students of the case for trying to understand this decidedly odd element interjected in a morning that ended with two people so violently hacked to death.

Whether Lizzie was guilty or not, her laughter ringing down from the top of the stairs—while the first victim lay nearby in a pool of congealed blood and the next victim was knocking at the door—does elicit chills. Maybe Woolcott was correct, and it was indeed Lizzie’s laugh that has carried her legend to the level of the most Shakespearean of tragedies.