Mental Illness ^(Myth)

In the years since, case observers have come up with lists of possible psychological disorders to help explain why a woman would viciously hack her parents to death. One can find all manner of essays, articles, YouTube videos (like this one ), and forum posts by various mental health professionals hypothesizing that Lizzie was a sociopath, or a psychopath, or bipolar, or schizophrenic, or suffered from different personality disorders.

Of course, this compulsion to diagnose Lizzie with some version of insanity is not new. Back in 1892, newspapers were full of articles asserting that whoever killed the Bordens, whether Lizzie or someone else, must have been insane. Modern theorizers with their Diagnostic and Statical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders in hand are perhaps more informed about mental illness than Victorian era theorizers, but they are not breaking new ground while trying to explain a crime that seems inexplicable.

Yet modern theorizers, no matter how well educated in psychology, are also caught in the same bind that plagued District Attorney Hosea Knowlton in 1892 when trying to make a diagnosis of mental illness stick to Lizzie. There were simply no signs or symptoms of her suffering from any such maladies either before or after the murders. The only reason to think Lizzie might have been mentally ill is if she committed the murders; however, the only reason to think she may have committed such brutal murders was if she was mentally ill. The logic of the premise is trapped within a closed loop; the only way out of that bind is to point to evidence that simply does not exist.

The Insanity Question in 1892

From the very first day, newspaper reporters declared the Borden murders to be so grisly, so savage, and so face-destroying in Andrew’s case, that only a crazed lunatic could have committed them. The police could hardly disagree. Yet, rather than collaring a demented criminal, they decided that the reserved, church-going daughter of the victims was their only viable suspect. This meant that Lizzie had to be a well-disguised lunatic. As a reporter for the Boston Advertiser noted in the week after her arrest, “It is an open secret in police circles that the government officers believe that Miss Borden was insane at the time of the murders.”

Letters written by Hosea Knowlton to his superior, the attorney general, reveal that he tried to talk Andrew Jennings into allowing Lizzie to be examined by a doctor to evaluate her mental health. Jennings naturally refused, to Knowlton’s disappointment. But the district attorney did not give up. He dispatched State Detective Moulton Batchelor to investigate. While the detective did not speak to any friends of Lizzie who regularly spent time with her (leading to later speculation that they may have refused to cooperate), he did speak to a dozen or so people on the periphery of Lizzie’s life who claimed familiarity with the Borden and Morse.

Not one of the people Batchelor interviewed would support the idea that Lizzie was insane. The worst they would say about her or her family members is that they believed them to be “odd” or “somewhat peculiar,” although what that meant, none said for the record. One man said that Lizzie “was known to be ugly,” another cryptic description. With nothing more to work with, Knowlton dropped the idea of trying to prove Lizzie insane.

The defense used her apparent sanity to their benefit. As George Robinson put it to the jury in his closing argument, the murders were so violent they had clearly been committed by the hand of someone “whose heart is blackened with depravity, whose whole life is a tissue of crime, whose past is a prophecy of that present … A maniac or a fiend, we say … a lunatic or a devil.” He then pointed to Lizzie and said:

“Gentlemen, as you look upon her you will pass your judgment that she is not insane. To believe she is guilty you must believe she is a fiend. Does she look it? As she sat there these long weary days and moved in and out before you, have you seen anything that shows the lack of humanly feeling and womanly bearing?”

No, Lizzie did not appear insane. As reporter Elizabeth Jordan, sitting in the courtroom each day, wrote, “No jury will believe that woman, with her firm face and steady intelligent eyes, ever did any important thing she had not subjected to the unobscured light of reason.” The prosecution certainly hadn’t presented any evidence of insanity. In fact, interviews with her friends and associates were full of phrases that described Lizzie as “level-headed” and “self-possessed,” the perfect example of a “gentlewoman.” And so, with no direct evidence pointing to her, it was no surprise to anyone, not even the district attorney himself, that the jury found her not guilty.

The Diagnosis Game

Just because her jury didn’t find Lizzie guilty didn’t mean the citizens of Fall River were ready to set aside suspicion. Knowlton may not have won a conviction, but his forceful spin on weak evidence managed to plant seeds of doubt about Lizzie, seeds that would sprout over the decades and grow to a cultural certainty that the jury got it wrong, and that Lizzie was indeed guilty.

But if one begins with a premise of guilt, then again, one comes face-to-face with the fact that neither police nor prosecutor ever came up with a viable motive for Lizzie to suddenly rise up on an ordinary Thursday morning and kill half her family. Yes, she didn’t much like her stepmother, and yes, she inherited a great deal of money. But she was destined for inheritance anyway. A money motive was considered so unlikely at the time that not even Hosea Knowlton suggested it at her trial. And, even if she wanted her father’s money badly enough to commit murder, that didn’t explain the ferocity of the attack, or the number of hatchet blows that shattered Abby’s skull to bits and turned Andrew’s face into what a witness described as “a mass of raw meat.” So back to mental illness theorists must go, not because she exhibited any symptoms, but because they need to rationalize their presumption of guilt.  

And so begins the hunt for clues that could be construed as signs of a mental illness from what little is known about Lizzie’s life. She was said by her former school principal to be a child of “varying moods.” She was said by a childhood friend to suffer periods of “melancholy.” She was said by a cousin to sometimes withdraw and avoid talking to family members and to act “sullen.” Of course, all these observations could describe any girl going through the pains of adolescence and young adulthood, especially if that girl had lost her mother at a young age and was living with a non-demonstrative stepmother who paid scant attention to her. (Emma testified that she and Lizzie always felt that Abby was uninterested in them). These observations could also be explained by something as mundane and harmless as mild autism, a common type of brain wiring that can often elicit descriptions like “odd” and “peculiar.”

Of course, while the factual record about Lizzie is missing hints that she was disguising a mental illness, the mythology that has grown about Lizzie over the decades provides a rich vein to mine. There is the shoplifting myth to work with, or the myth that she staged a burglary of her own house. There is even a myth (pushed by Abby’s niece) that she liked to chop the heads off of cats. Another rumor, repeated by Edmund Pearson in a 1933 article for The New Yorker, told of Lizzie strangling a sick childhood friend so she could get ahold of her possessions. Yet another frequently told story accused Lizzie of stripping the fancy underwear from a well-dressed corpse.

More recent additions to this mythology, like Lizzie being a closeted lesbian who was about to be committed to an asylum by her father because of it, have been invented by screenwriters for more dramatic movie and television depictions. Certainly, the psychologists at the 1992 conference leaned heavily into unsubstantiated myths to support their assertions that Lizzie killed because of some kind psychopathy.

But if one is going to work with proven facts about Lizzie and her life, not what was whispered amongst gossips after her arrest, or invented decades later to sell a book or a movie, then there is simply no basis for a retroactive diagnosis that Lizzie suffered from any kind of mental illness. Her life before the murders was filled with a well-known devotion to church and charity, and her life afterward was replete with examples of her kindness and generosity to others. The only fact-supported diagnosis one might reasonably assert is the occasional bout with depression, something Lizzie herself admitted to her friend Alice Russell “comes over me sometimes.”

Still, message boards are full of the speculative musings of those who feel certain that Lizzie had borderline personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder, or whatever it was their grandmother or aunt or brother suffered from that reminded them of their own perception of Lizzie. They will talk about Lizzie as if they knew her personally, as if they had spent time sitting with her, as if they knew how she thought and felt about anything and everything and why. “Like all narcissists, she thought only of herself and obviously felt entitled to the good life,” one will say. Or, “She clearly had abandonment issues because her mother died when she was young, so she perceived Andrew as abandoning her when he married Abby.” Or, “It’s obvious Lizzie didn’t believe that anyone had a right to question her about the murders, she believed she had a right to illogical statements.”

Most of us do this, if we delve into the case long enough. We assimilate what we learn about Lizzie, whether fact or oft-repeated myth, in a way that personally makes sense. And for many it makes no sense to believe that Lizzie could commit two horrific hatchet murders without a frame of mental illness to understand it.

But what if she was actually innocent, as the people who knew her and actually spent time with her believed? Despite her arrest, her friends continued to regard her as innocent, as did her pastors, her family, most of the reporters in the courtroom, and her jury. What if they were right, and Lizzie was wrongly accused? It is an interesting thought experiment to presume Lizzie innocent and look at the case again. Would it still be worth the effort to dig through comments written about her in newspapers, or the words she spoke at the inquest, and diagnose her with a mental illness? Probably not.

Again, this reveals that the compulsion to diagnose Lizzie with a mental illness arises from a presumption of guilt. We then work backwards from there looking for symptoms of various disorders and interpret everything we find through that guilty lens. But if we switch the lens, Lizzie becomes a normal Victorian woman dealing with the normal life challenges of her time and place, with good days and bad days like anyone else. The day her father and stepmother were murdered was a very bad day; horrific violence swept through her house, left her father and stepmother dead, and left her standing there, dazed. She was severely judged for her demeanor afterward, for her confused words. But what would be a “normal” reaction to such abnormal and traumatizing events?

Of course, if she was guilty then, yes, the frame of mental illness is almost certainly required to explain it. But let’s not forget that her guilt was not validated in a courtroom then, nor can it be proven today. Without proof beyond a reasonable doubt, we put the mental illness cart before the horse, spin our speculative wheels, and, like the police who arrested Lizzie on gut instinct rather than compelling evidence, we get nowhere in determining what really happened to Andrew and Abby Borden.