Locked Doors

In Angela Carter’s evocative short story, “The Fall River Axe Murders,” written in the 1980s, the celebrated British writer described the house at 92 Second Street, as “a house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmate’s personal territory; it is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document.”

There were three entry doors into the house. The cellar door that opened into the backyard was always kept locked, except for Tuesdays, when Bridget Sullivan hung out the laundry to dry. Afterward, she would bolt that door and then, she testified, Andrew would come along behind her to make sure it was locked. The front door sported three locks, a “spring lock” which locked automatically whenever the door was shut (although sometimes it didn’t “catch,” at least according to Emma Borden and her uncle John Morse), plus a bolt and another lock in which a key was kept inserted. At the inquest, Lizzie said the front door “was always unlocked in the mornings,” although she didn’t specifically say whose responsibility it was to unbolt it. Emma would later say, “Usually when my sister or I came downstairs, one or the other unlocked it.” (Lizzie testified that on the morning of the murders, she didn’t think she had unlocked the front door but was not asked to explain why she hadn’t; the prosecution seemed to find this departure from her supposed norm significant.) In the evenings, the last one of the girls to come inside, usually Lizzie, would lock the bolt and turn the key to keep the house secure at night.

The backdoor boasted locks that needed keys in order to get in, but in summertime the heat of the nearby kitchen required that they leave that door open during the day. Which is not to say it was left unsecured; there was a screen door which was kept hooked. If one of the inhabitants had to leave, another inhabitant, usually Bridget, would follow them to the door and hook it. (Lizzie said at the inquest that Bridget had charge of the backdoor.) If someone had to step outside for a few minutes, it was expected that someone would hook the screen when they came back in. During his appearance at the inquest, John Morse, a guest at the house the night before the murders, said doors to the outside were “always” kept fastened at the Borden house. “They have been very cautious, always have been, about the doors.” Indeed, the primary conversations between Bridget and Lizzie on the morning before the murders were the two of them discussing who was going to lock the doors and when. (One of those discussions led to Lizzie leaving the screen door unhooked while Bridget was out washing windows, allowing the maid to go in and out as necessary.)

But the outside doors were not the only doors that were typically kept locked. Many of the inside doors had to be opened with a key as well. Andrew famously locked his bedroom door and left the key to it lying on the mantel (more on that below). Lizzie also locked her bedroom door whenever she stepped out of her room, and often even when she was in it, unless it was too warm upstairs and she needed to leave the door open for a cross draft. This is why she told police officers they were wasting their time the day of the murders when they searched her room; she pointed out that the assailant couldn’t have hidden anything in there, as her door had been locked the entire time she was downstairs and out in the barn. (Officers searched anyway.) Even the upstairs clothes closet was kept locked, and officers had to ask Lizzie to unlock that room, too, in order to look inside it.

These locked doors were emphasized at trial by the prosecution, as it helped them argue that Lizzie had the only opportunity to commit the murders. They asserted it would have been all but impossible for an intruder to get into the house, although this was not entirely true; the screen door had been unhooked for nearly an hour while Bridget was outside. But whatever the technical merits (or lack thereof) to their evidentiary argument about how tightly the house was locked that morning, talking about it certainly set a tone suggesting something was not quite right in the Borden household, if the family was that obsessed about locking their doors. What they didn’t acknowledge was that there was something not quite safe about the neighborhood.

A Matter of Security

In the late 19th century, as the population of Fall River swelled with immigrants hoping to find work in the mills, those on the lower end of income spectrum settled near downtown areas closest to the mills, while the upper crust settled up on The Hill overlooking town. In 1892, Second Street, near the heart of downtown, was no longer a quiet residential street—where the city mayor boasted the nicest house on the block—but was in the process of becoming a busy business thoroughfare. Many of the houses sported businesses such as stores and restaurants on their street-level bottom floors. Even the house owned by the former Mayor Buffinton, next door to the Borden house, had become a boarding house run by his daughter, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill.

In other words, there were a lot of people moving up and down Second Street, on foot and by horse and carriage, and most of them were not residents who lived on the street. This brought an element of the unknown to those who did live there, and some of those unknowns turned out to be no respecter of property. The newspapers frequently reported house burglaries in that part of the city, and a thief had struck the Borden house in broad daylight in June 1891, the year before the murders, with Emma, Lizzie, and Bridget all at home. A number of items, including money and things with sentimental value to Abby, were taken. (This burglary has often been attributed to Lizzie, thanks to police hinting that this is what they eventually came to believe, perhaps in an attempt to help build an impression of Lizzie’s guilt for the murders in a town scandalized by her arrest.) This brazen burglary undoubtedly alarmed the Borden family, as did two break-ins to the barn in the Spring of 1892, just months before the murders. No wonder, then, that Andrew Borden installed barbed wire on his back fence, and kept a heavy knobbed stick under his bed in case he had to confront an intruder. And it is no wonder that the entire family was committed to making sure all the doors that provided entry to the house were kept locked. Or, that they may have wanted to keep their belongings inside safely under lock and key.

While it could be true that the Bordens were more security conscious than many of their neighbors, we all react differently to perceived security threats. It would appear that both Abby and Lizzie had a particular fear of outsiders who might have a grudge against Andrew, an allegedly pitiless landlord, visiting harm upon the family. We see this with Abby’s trip to see Dr. Bowen the morning before the murders, in which she spoke of her fears that they had all been poisoned. We also see it with Lizzie’s trip that same evening to visit Alice Russell, where she spoke of the same fear and revealed feelings of dread that because Andrew treated people so unkindly that “something might happen.”

As for that key on the mantel that writers often assert Andrew left in plain sight as a subtle “rebuke” to Lizzie for supposedly breaking into his room in June 1891, that little piece of mythology was invented by novelist Victoria Lincoln a full 75 years after the murders. Andrew had apparently always left the key on the mantel after locking the bedroom so that Abby could easily locate it and use it when she needed to get into their room. However, the idea that an unspoken power struggle between Andrew and Lizzie played out in such a way is an idea that creative writers who take up the subject of the murders find impossible to resist.

Indeed, locked doors and the keys that open them are such potent symbols to us that when those who believe Lizzie guilty of the murders try to understand what may have led her to such a violent outburst, they are certain those locked-tight doors hold important clues.

A Family Without Trust?

Most every author who writes about the murders agrees that the locked doors of the Borden house, especially those on the inside, betray a family with pathological trust issues. The inhabitants seemed obviously to be creating barriers against each other, locking each other out of their own spaces to protect their “privacies.” Some observers go far as to suggest that the elder Bordens had become fearful of an allegedly unbalanced Lizzie, citing the rumor that Lizzie committed the burglary of the house the year before. (The 2018 film Lizzie featured a subplot in which Andrew was about to have Lizzie committed to an asylum.) Others go the other way, and say the locked doors betray that it was Emma and Lizzie who were fearful of Andrew and then suggest he may have been their sexual abuser.

Either way, the locked doors do appear to indicate a family doing their level best to avoid each other. There is certainly evidence that things were not always harmonious between the elder Bordens and “the girls.” Five years before the murders, Emma and Lizzie ran into a “difference of opinion” (Lizzie’s words) with their father and stepmother about some property that Andrew had gifted Abby, an incident that wounded Lizzie enough that she stopped calling Abby “Mother.” Lizzie also “gave the impression” to her friend Augusta Tripp that she believed Abby was “two-faced” and deceptive, presumably about Abby’s level of influence over Andrew. As a result, Lizzie would claim to her cloak-maker, Hannah Gifford, that she and Emma often preferred to eat their meals separately from Andrew and Abby, something that Bridget confirmed in court.

While Hosea Knowlton would attempt to turn these minor difficulties into a heated motive for murder, for those familiar with the challenges faced by blended families, tensions arising between stepparents and their stepchildren is not uncommon and could even arguably be considered the norm. Furthermore, many parents who have adult children still living at home often move along their own individual paths as they discover that giving each other as much space as possible helps them more easily navigate the challenges of cohabitation. Emma was 41 and Lizzie was 32 at the time of the murders; there is nothing odd about women nearing middle age living independent lives separate from those of their parents, shared roof or not. As Lizzie’s close friend, Mrs. Marianna Holmes put it to The Boston Post, “The girls were women grown. They came and went without question from anyone.”

Despite Knowlton’s attempt to make a mountain of massive hatred out of molehills of small conflicts, all evidence suggests that Lizzie lived “cordially” in that house with her father and stepmother, a house that was designed as a divided, two-family house. Built in 1845, and often referred to as the “railroad house,” there were no hallways in which to move through the house, just rooms that opened up into the others through numerous doorways. (Lizzie’s room alone featured four different doorways into other rooms on the upper floor.) This meant, for the sake of personal privacy, that some of the doors were kept permanently locked and furniture pushed up against them; hence, all the locks and keys.

Yet, while the Bordens seemed to adapt well enough to the eccentricities of the house, as well as to the uncertain security of the neighborhood, observers can’t help but feel there was something “wrong” about how the Bordens lived, or that it was “odd” that they chose to lock their bedroom doors. They view those locked doors as not only representing hostile divisions, but as creating an unnatural pressure cooker that eventually caused Lizzie to explode into violence against those with whom she shared the house. Either that, or the locked doors were a symptom of the internalized pressure Lizzie felt to escape the confines of life under her father’s thumb. If Lizzie truly did kill Andrew and Abby, perhaps there is some truth to such interpretations.

However, the pull of such rich symbolism aside, there is zero evidence that the Bordens used their locks and keys for anything other than to try to keep themselves and their belongings safe from outsiders. Unfortunately, on the morning of August 4th, 1892, their efforts failed.