Motive: Hatred

On August 4th , 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were viciously hacked to death in their own home, with so many hatchet blows to the head that it seemed at first that only a madman could have done such damage. After all, who in their right mind could possibly want a harmless old couple dead? True, Andrew might have made a few people unhappy in his tenure as landlord, but his wife, Abby, didn’t have a known enemy in the world. The police, however, would soon feel sure they’d found a credible enemy for Abby: her youngest stepdaughter, who had been living under the same roof with her for 27 years.

Yes, five years before the murders, the Borden girls became upset at Abby over property Andrew bought and put in Abby’s name (see Feud), something often referred to in court as “the trouble.” While this “difference of opinion,” as Lizzie described it at the inquest, seemed to be resolved quickly by Andrew deeding property to Emma and Lizzie of equal value, it still prompted Lizzie to stop calling Abby “Mother,” and to begin referring to her as Mrs. Borden (as we will examine below). Lizzie also told Hannah Gifford that she and Emma preferred not to eat meals with Andrew and Abby “if we can help it.” But that was the sum total of testimony in court about any ill feeling Lizzie harbored toward Abby. There was actually more testimony about Lizzie and Abby’s cooperation with each other on things like sewing projects and church attendance together.

So how did Lizzie’s fairly typical stepfamily dysfunction become a narrative of hatred so malignant that it caused Lizzie not just to strike out at Abby in lethal violence, but to attack her father, too? Of course, if Lizzie really did kill Abby, she must have despised her stepmother to a degree far beyond what those around her ever would have guessed. But here again we encounter that chicken-or-egg situation that Robinson frequently spoke of; do we believe Lizzie hated Abby because we presume she’s guilty, or do we think she’s guilty because she showed signs of hatred before the murders? It’s an important question because objective signs of virulent hatred between stepmother and stepdaughter are sparse. What we do have is the very subjective opinion of those who investigated and prosecuted Lizzie.

Through the Eyes of Authorities

First, we have Deputy Marshal Fleet interviewing Lizzie on the day of the murders, and when he referred to Abby as her mother, Lizzie corrected him, saying, “She is not my mother, she is my stepmother. My mother died when I was a child.” This statement of fact, or perhaps it was the way she said it, clearly rubbed Fleet the wrong way. Within the next day or two, police were questioning Lizzie’s friends and family about the relationship and finding that Lizzie had expressed thoughts critical of Abby and her truthfulness.

Yet, it was when the case was put into the hands of District Attorney Hosea Knowlton that the narrative of seething hatred as motive really gained steam. He may have decided he didn’t have much choice, at least according to Bordenologist Eugene Hosey, writing in The Hatchet. Lizzie’s alleged malice toward Abby became “the soul of his case against Lizzie, for without this it is not possible to believe in Lizzie Borden as the assassin of her parents, regardless of the circumstantial evidence arrayed against her.”

By the time of the trial, that narrative of hatred had grown to epic proportions. While William Moody, in his opening remarks, kicked off their story by claiming Hannah Gifford had reported Lizzie as saying, “Don’t call her ‘Mother.’ She is a mean thing, and we hate her.” But that word was not actually spoken by Mrs. Gifford on the stand. Her actual testimony was this:

A: I was speaking to [Lizzie] of a garment I had made for Mrs. Borden, and instead of saying Mrs. Borden I said “mother” and she says, “Don’t say that to me, for she is a mean, good-for-nothing thing.” I said, “Oh Lizzie, you don’t mean that?” And she said, “Yes, I don’t have much to do with her; I stay in my room most of the time.”

Lizzie’s words do describe a relationship that didn’t work well, but clearly, Lizzie didn’t tell Mrs. Gifford that she “hated” her stepmother. That was Moody’s insertion. But his small embellishment was nothing compared to the monstrous malevolence District Attorney Knowlton chose to ascribe to Lizzie, sitting only feet away from him in the courtroom, quietly listening. “There was a skeleton [in the closet] of which we have seen the grinning eyeballs and the dangling limbs,” Knowlton began in his closing arguments. “It is useless to tell you that there was peace and harmony in that family. We know better. The remark that was made to Mrs. Gifford, the dressmaker, was not a petulant outburst that might come and go.”

Of course, as we see from Alice Russell’s comment about the Bordens being “the same as any family,” that is exactly what most who knew of Lizzie’s feelings toward her stepmother believed, that Lizzie complained about Abby on occasion, but not to an unusual degree. When police went to speak to Mrs. Augusta Tripp, one of Lizzie’s friends since childhood, Mrs. Tripp told them Lizzie had said nothing to her about Abby recently, and couldn’t remember her saying anything overtly negative about Abby ever; however, Mrs. Tripp had formed her own “impression” that Lizzie believed Abby was two-faced, pretending to be one thing to her face and another thing behind her back. These were not warm words, but nor were they words that foreshadowed murder. Overall, Lizzie and Abby seemed to tolerate each other well enough, having perfected the art of staying out of each other’s way over the decades they lived together. Yet, Knowlton believed he knew differently and considered Lizzie stripping from Abby the title of mother to be a particularly “wicked” act.

Knowlton prefaces this opinion by waxing poetic about how Abby had reared Lizzie from the time she was five years old, in “the tenderest of all human relations,” and that Abby “had been her mother, faithful and persevering.” No doubt Lizzie’s sister, Emma, would have disagreed with this sentiment, for she had told Knowlton at the inquest that “we never felt [Abby] was interested in us.” Yet, Knowlton continued on about Lizzie’s debt to Abby. “This girl owed everything to her.”

Knowlton then launched into a lengthy harangue about the cruelty that Lizzie showed Abby by refusing to call her “Mother” any longer. “She repudiated the title that that woman should have had from her. Did you ever hear of such a case as that? I have once … It struck me as the most unnatural thing.” He next suggested that Lizzie’s refusal to call her “Mother” was actually more harmful to Abby than murder. “The assassin’s blade cuts deep. That wicked hatchet went deep down into the brain of that old woman, but Mr. Foreman, it never went so deep into Abby Durfee Borden as did the contemptuous refusal of this girl to call her by the name of mother. It was a living insult to that woman, a living expression of contempt … repeated day in and day out.”

As Knowlton launched into second half of his closing the following morning, he seemed ready to move on from the subject, declaring Lizzie’s motive—and thus Lizzie’s supposed hatred of Abby—irrelevant to his case. “We are called upon to prove that the thing was done, and our duty stops there. We are not called upon to prove why it was done. It is no part of the Commonwealth’s evidence.” Motive, he said, “is no essential link in its chain of proof.” (Ironic, when he spent the first hour of his closing argument talking about it.) “It is a matter of history that motives are neither adequate, nor even tolerable when considered with a crime.”

Yet, after this insistence that motive didn’t matter, he again dove into his depiction of Lizzie’s heartlessness in refusing to call Abby “Mother,” by declaring that he himself would rather be killed by his own daughter than to have his daughter “live with me for years and taunt me with ingratitude, deny me the title I had earned by years of patient devotion.” He continued: “The malice was all before the fact. The wickedness was all before the fourth day of August. The ingratitude, the poisoning, the hate, the stabbing of the mind, which is worse than the stabbing of the body, had gone on under that roof for many, many months.” In Knowlton’s telling, Lizzie hated Abby so much that she tortured her stepmother with base ingratitude for years before finally killing her.

What Lizzie Herself Said About Abby

There was, of course, no way Knowlton could know any of this, he was spinning a story for a jury as lawyers in courtrooms do. And, at one point, he gave brief acknowledgement of this by asking, “Am I exaggerating this thing? She [Lizzie] kept her own counsel.” For that one moment, anyway, he admitted he didn’t truly know how Lizzie felt. He certainly didn’t know whether Abby had earned the right to be called “Mother” in Lizzie’s estimation, because Lizzie was not about to tell him, a man aggressively trying to convict her for murder, a man clearly unsafe to trust. The one time she did answer Knowlton’s questions, at the inquest, she did not breathe hate for Abby, but neither did she fake a closeness she didn’t feel.

Q: You have been on pleasant terms with your stepmother since [the trouble over the property]?

A: Yes sir.

Q: Cordial?

A: It depends upon one’s idea of cordiality perhaps.

Q: According to your idea of cordiality?

A: We were friendly; very friendly.

Q: Cordial, according to your idea of cordiality?

A: Quite so.

Q: What do you mean by “quite so?”

A: Quite cordial. I do not mean the dearest of friends in the world, but very kindly feelings and pleasant. I do not know how to answer you any better than that.

Q: You did not regard her as your mother?

A: Not exactly, no; although she came there when I was very young.

Q: Were your relations toward her that of daughter and mother?

A: In some ways it was and in some it was not.

While one cannot see body language or hear tone of voice in a transcript, this reads like Lizzie being honest about her relationship with Abby to the best of her ability. Whatever their problem may have been over the property transfer, a problem Lizzie did not deny, they managed to live together peaceably for years afterwards.

Nonetheless, Knowlton at trial was determined to turn Lizzie into a walking cauldron of hatred, and any difficulty between stepmother and stepdaughter was blamed on Lizzie’s wickedness. The murdered Abby was made clean and blameless. Meanwhile, anything Emma had to say about the “trouble” in the family or her own dislike for Abby, a dislike she claimed ran deeper than her sister’s, Knowlton dismissed as pretense borne out of “loyalty” to Lizzie. Indeed, he claimed to feel so sorry for “unfortunate Emma,” that “I could not find it in my heart to ask her many questions.” One wonders if he didn’t question her out of sympathy, or because he didn’t want her and her insider knowledge to contradict his outsider diagnosis of “the cancer” he claimed had eaten into Lizzie. “We cannot guess how far that sore had festered, how far the blood in that family had been poisoned, by the misfortune of these unfortunate relations between them.”

There is no doubt Knowlton was heavily embroidering for the jury, as well as planting the seeds for the legend of Lizzie as a hate-driven axe murderess. Of course, that doesn’t mean Lizzie didn’t feel hatred for her stepmother. We have no more knowledge of Lizzie’s thoughts than Knowlton or anyone else. All I know is that after much looking, it is difficult to find solid evidence of true hatred before the murders, and what evidence was presented in court we have already covered. However, there are some intriguing clues as to why Lizzie’s feelings toward Abby may have taken a negative turn.

Was It Hatred or Was It Hurt?

In Leonard Rebello’s Lizzie Borden: Past and Present, there is a photo of a silver-plated drinking cup, engraved “to Lizzie from Abbie,” presented to Lizzie from her stepmother when she was 8 years old. It seems that Abby at one point did take at least some interest in young Lizzie. And Hiram Harrington, who lived in the same house with Lizzie and Abby in the first years after Abby and Andrew were married, said at the inquest that, “For several years, I guess, of his early marriage with her, everything was very, very pleasant, uncommonly so for a stepmother.” So what happened?

Most assume that a rift opened because of Lizzie’s resentment over the house Andrew bought and put in Abby’s name, perhaps causing her to fear that Abby might inherit the lion’s share of Andrew’s property when he died. Yet, because Andrew’s solution to the problem, gifting his daughters with the Ferry Street house owned by their grandfather, didn’t make the girls feel more forgiving toward Abby, that tells us the ill feeling was probably not resentment over property or money. It was likely about something much deeper.  

At the inquest, Alice Russell offered her opinion that Abby and her stepdaughters didn’t get along well because they were so different. “Their tastes differed in every way; one liked one thing, the other liked another.” But as Knowlton tried to get her to pin down the essence of the trouble between them, Alice offered this: “Nothing further than she was the stepmother.” Alice then said Lizzie may have thought her “own mother might have had more influence over” her father. When asked to clarify, Alice said, “The father was the head of the house, they had to do as he thought. Mrs. Borden did not control the house; the whole summing up of it was that.”  

Lizzie grew up calling Abby “Mother,” looking at Abby as her mother, as someone who would advocate for her with her father just as a real mother would. But it seems that when push came to shove, Abby did not advocate for Lizzie’s needs and wishes as Lizzie might have hoped, because Abby apparently claimed that she had no influence on Andrew. Which Lizzie had apparently accepted and believed … until Andrew bought the property Abby’s half-sister lived in and put it in Abby’s name. That made it clear that Abby did indeed have influence over Andrew. Lizzie said as much to Knowlton at the inquest when he asked her about the trouble over the property. “We always thought [Abby] persuaded father to buy it. At any rate, he did buy it and I am quite sure she did persuade him.”

Lizzie openly admitted to Knowlton at the inquest that it was the property put in Abby’s name that “led” her to stop calling Abby “Mother.” But she didn’t use the word property or house to describe it. She described it as “the affair with the stepsister.” The sister that Abby was willing to go bat for with Andrew, when Abby hadn’t been willing to go to bat for her. Many think that Lizzie complaining about Abby’s “influence” over her father was about her fears the future, fear that Abby could convince Andrew to disinherit his daughters; yet it seems her complaints were less about the future and more about her pain over the past. Lizzie didn’t hate Abby so much as she felt hurt by Abby, perhaps betrayed by Abby. And that is why she stopped calling her “Mother.” In her mind, Abby no longer deserved the title. And when anyone else called Abby her mother, whether Hannah Gifford or Officer Fleet, it triggered her hurt all over again, and she would correct them.   

This is all, of course, speculation based on hints from the testimony of people who knew Lizzie. We don’t really know what Lizzie herself may have truly felt about Abby. As Knowlton observed, she kept her own counsel. And, even if it was hurt feelings that caused Lizzie to stop calling Abby “Mother,” it’s possible that her hurt eventually grew into a profound loathing over the years of forced cohabitation. If one assumes Lizzie guilty of murdering Abby, there are reasons besides Knowlton’s dramatics to suspect a hatred simmering beneath the surface and feeding a family dynamic that became deadly.

Through the Lens of Guilt

In his closing arguments at the trial, “Knowlton paints a picture of a quarrelsome, embittered household where animosity festers and volatile anger must be constantly suppressed,” wrote Eugene Hosey. “He uses every kind of evidence available to him to demonstrate Lizzie’s murderous hatred of Abby—the refusal to call her mother; the resentment over Andrew’s financial assistance for Abby’s relations; the remark to the dressmaker calling Abby a ‘mean, good-for-nothing old thing;’ the correction made to the officer who referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother.” Indeed, these four items were the sum and substance of Knowlton’s proof of his assertions. Yet there were other statements made to police or reporters that were not brought up in court that also create an impression of negative feeling for Abby on Lizzie’s part.

Anna Borden, no close relation to Lizzie, but a friend from church, was called to the stand to reveal the confidences Lizzie had shared with her during their Grand Tour of Europe in 1890. Anna had shared a boat cabin with Lizzie and was prepared to testify that Lizzie told her several times she was not looking forward to going home. Before the judges ruled the testimony inadmissible due to remoteness in time, Moody described her expected testimony: “After this witness and the prisoner had spent the summer in various parts of Europe in travel, there was this conversation which I am about to state, which was several times repeated: it was in substance that [Lizzie] regretted the necessity of returning home after she had such a happy summer, because the home that she was about to return to was such an unhappy home. This conversation, as I say, was repeated several times.”

Also at the inquest, Augusta Tripp, the longtime friend of Lizzie’s, described the relationship between Lizzie and Abby as “not agreeable … Their manner to each other was not that of those persons that are agreeable to each other, or it did not seem to be.” Mrs. Tripp was echoed by Alice Russell who said she thought the relationship was “not congenial.”

Meanwhile, Bridget Sullivan, who claimed on the stand that she didn’t know anything about the family’s troubles, was more forthcoming to a private detective named Nellie McHenry, at least according to a letter McHenry wrote to Hosea Knowlton after getting Bridget to open up by pretending to be a relation of Abby’s. The letter was included in The Knowlton Papers, and the detective reported that Bridget revealed “the place was not pleasant … on account of the odd habits of the family. She said things were not very pleasant in the house. I asked how it was, [and she said] well, the girls kept so much to themselves, there was no love for the stepmother.”

While these remarks by others are fairly mild and don’t actually indicate that Lizzie harbored explosive hatred toward Abby, they do support a relationship gone sour, especially when taken altogether. Certainly, Lizzie’s admission to Hannah Gifford that she and Emma tried to avoid eating meals at the same table with Andrew and Abby—which Bridget confirmed did happen either once in awhile or “most often” depending on which appearance in court you want to choose—is a strong sign of aversion to her.

Yet, there is something else that does speak dramatically of hatred for the victim, and that is the extreme violence perpetrated on her. Many observers have remarked that only someone who hated Abby with a vengeance would have attacked her so brutally. Driving a hatchet into someone’s head 18 times is an expression of deep rage, and most likely a personal rage (see Overkill). And Knowlton was right about one thing: police found no evidence that anyone else had even the smallest bit of animosity toward Abby Borden. There were only two people known to feel any kind of dislike for Abby: her two stepdaughters. And, as Emma was away from home on the day of the murders, that left Lizzie.

Through the Lens of Innocence 

While police found plenty of people to bear witness that Lizzie didn’t much like her stepmother, those who had the most opportunity to observe the family, from Alice Russell to Bridget Sullivan, confirmed that they never actually heard any harsh words between mother and stepdaughter. Nor did they say that Lizzie ever told them anything openly hostile toward her. And there were many who came forward to claim that Lizzie and Abby got along fairly well.

Lizzie’s friend Mary Brigham, who had been close to her since childhood and often sat with her in the courtroom during her trial, gave an interview to the Boston Post in which she said, “I wish you would stamp as a lie the allegation that Lizzie was not happy with her father and mother—her step-mother I mean. She has told me many times that these latter years of her life have been her happiest.” She went on to say of Abby and Lizzie’s relationship, “While [Abby] was a very good woman, she was not at all affectionate … She was simply mild and good, and so long as things went smoothly she would have very little to say about the house. So that this should not be taken as proof of any bitter feelings between them, for there was none.”

Three days after the murders, the Boston Herald featured an interview with Mrs. Ella Cluny, a second cousin of Andrew Borden who said she had spent a week at the house and never witnessed any ill feelings between Lizzie and Abby. Lizzie, she said, “never acted as though she disliked her stepmother, rather she seemed to show as much regard for her as I believed it possible for her to show anyone.” Mrs. Marianna Holmes, also stalwart friend of Lizzie, said in court that for several years before the murders she believed Lizzie was on friendly terms with her stepmother and that she personally witnessed them attending church services together.  

Mrs. Mary Raymond, the family dressmaker, described a three-week visit there in May 1892, three months before the murders. During that time, she made dresses both for Abby and Lizzie and both women worked together in the guest room, along with Emma, sewing their new dresses. Lizzie and Abby seemed to have regularly undertaken sewing projects together, with Lizzie telling Knowlton at the inquest that a few weeks before the murders Abby “had given me some pillowcases to make.” And Lizzie attributing credit to Abby for her sewing contributions in Lizzie’s efforts to raise money for charity can be found in several newspaper accounts.

Even Augusta Tripp, who didn’t think the relationship was all that “agreeable,” defined the lack of agreeableness not as a relationship that was quarrelsome, just overly quiet. “Whenever I saw them together … everything went along quietly. They did not seem to make very much conversation with each other … Not that they kept away from each other, not that at all, but that they did not enter into conversation, perhaps, with each other,” as she thought a mother and daughter would. But she also said that “Lizzie talked with her mother more than Emma.”

Yes, Lizzie did say of Abby in the hours after her murder, “She is not my mother, she is my stepmother.” But as her attorney, George Robinson, pointed out, this was merely a statement of fact, told by a forthright Lizzie, who said something similar when the police asked about “the Portuguese” that worked on Andrew’s farm in Swansea. She said, “He is not Portuguese, he is a Swede.” Lizzie herself described her thought process about the comment during the one newspaper interview she granted while awaiting trial at Taunton jail. She told Kate McGuirk of the New York Recorder that when she told Officer Fleet that Abby was not her mother but her stepmother, “I supposed, if it was necessary that I must talk to them just then, I must tell as near as I could what was right … It seems as if every word I have uttered has been distorted and such a false construction placed on it that I am bewildered. I can’t understand it.”

Probably the most sensible words at the subject of Lizzie’s alleged hatred came from Judge Justin Dewey at her trial in his charge to the jury. He advised the jury to “keep all parts of [the testimony they heard] in their natural and proper proportion and not put on any particular piece of evidence a greater weight than it will reasonably bear, and not to magnify or intensify or depreciate and belittle any piece of evidence to meet an emergency.” He referred to Hannah Gifford’s claims about Lizzie calling Abby a “good-for-nothing thing” and asked the jury to “consider whether or not it will fairly amount to the significance attached to it.” Dewey then reminded the jury that presuming guilt before judging testimony could lead to false conclusions, and imbue Lizzie’s words with a more hostile meaning than they merited. What you wish, he added, “is a true conception—a true conception of the state of the mind of the defendant toward her stepmother … and to get a such a true conception you must not separate Mrs. Gifford’s testimony from all the rest, but consider also the evidence as to how they lived in the family … in a word, the general tenor of their life.”

From the general tenor of life in the Borden household, it was clearly not a close-knit family. Lizzie did seem to avoid being around Abby when possible, perhaps based on some kind of hurt she was nursing, or perhaps because, as Alice said, they had little in common but church and sewing. But Lizzie was well-mannered, and never openly rude or disrespectful to her stepmother. From what those who observed them together reported—including Bridget, who heard them talking in the hour before the murder—they spoke to each other “pleasantly” about household affairs, and seemed to make a point of asking each other how they were feeling after being ill. And so, when Lizzie says that she and Abby were “not the dearest of friends” but they were still operated with “kindly feelings,” the evidence available to us seems to support that version far better than Knowlton’s saga of venomous hatred.

Author’s Take

The archetype of the “evil stepmother” runs deep in our culture, making it easy to be swayed by the prosecution’s theory that Lizzie hated her stepmother enough to butcher her. But I take to heart Judge Dewey’s charge to the jury to “weigh carefully all the testimony on the subject … then judge whether or not it is clearly proved such a permanent state of mind on the part of the defendant toward her stepmother.” When I look at all the evidence I can find on the subject, I personally don’t see signs of a permanent state of hatred. What I see are signs of dismay and hurt and the defensive posture one takes when one feels emotionally abandoned by someone once trusted.

Andrew married Abby and brought her into their home before Lizzie turned five. Children that young are going to follow the lead of the adult. If Abby had lavished love onto Lizzie, or at least acted in ways that made Lizzie feel important to her, then I would guess that Lizzie would have displayed great loyalty to the only mother figure she had known. The fact that she didn’t speaks more, in my mind, to Abby’s probable failures with her stepdaughters than to any inherent “wickedness” within Lizzie. Not that I believe Abby was a bad person, either, but being a mother may not have come naturally to her, and becoming a stepmother is not easy even in the most ideal conditions. And life under the intransigent thumb of Andrew Borden was almost certainly less than ideal.

Of course, if Lizzie did kill Abby—and there is enough circumstantial evidence to cause one to consider that she may have—then Lizzie no doubt bore great hatred for Abby. But that is putting the cart before the horse. We don’t know that it was Lizzie who did the killing. The fact that Abby ended up murdered is not somehow “proof” that Lizzie hated her. And without stronger evidence that Lizzie actually did despise Abby before the murders, then I don’t see a decent motive for Lizzie to have done that particular deed. And neither, apparently, did the prosecution. That’s why Knowlton exaggerated and embellished and used his considerable storytelling skills to turn a grieving woman previously known for her good character into a virago bent on destruction.