Motive: Money

When we encounter a terrible murder—and the Borden murders were absolutely horrific—we cannot help but want to know why, why, why? We need to know why, we have to make sense of it. And so, the police go looking for a motive, the press goes looking, we all go looking. We hunt for clues, pick apart the words of witnesses, but we have no idea if we are looking in the right place, especially if and when the identity of the murderer is in question. We don’t know if Lizzie actually killed her parents, and if she didn’t, then we may think we have discovered a motive when really we are just making stuff up. But if she did do it, well, it is more reasonable to say this could be why, or that could be why; but, even then, we could still just be making stuff up.

Yes, Lizzie inherited a great deal of money, and that undoubtedly gives her a motive. Oddly, at her trial, the prosecution didn’t do much to suggest that a determination to inherit sooner than later was Lizzie’s motive; instead, they staked their case on Lizzie’s supposed hatred for her stepmother as the overriding motive, with Andrew being unfortunate collateral damage. Maybe they chose that route because they had at least a few shreds of supportive evidence of her dislike for Abby, but had no real evidence that Lizzie was in a hurry to get her hands on her father’s money. Knowlton admitted as much in his closing. “We do not know—the lips of those that know are sealed in death, and we never shall know in this world—we do not know what new propositions this poor man had ventured to make with regard of his own … We do not know but that man had talked, as many a man does when he comes to that age, of exercising his legal right of making testamentary disposition of his property. We know nothing of it.”

Surprisingly, for a prosecutor who aggressively speculated about most everything else in the case, that was the entirety of Knowlton’s speculation on Andrew preparing to make a will. But one can guess why he moved on. Lizzie was widely believed to be a devoted daughter to her father and had even given him a ring that he wore until the day of his death. Why would a jury believe she would kill him to get what she was bound to get within a few years anyway?

Of course, Andrew had a wife, Abby, a wife Lizzie believed had influence over him (she implied as much at the inquest), and that could have complicated her expectation of what she might inherit. Andrew had not made a will; he died intestate. If he had died before Abby, instead of after, by state law Abby would have had “dower rights” and would have inherited one-third of Andrew’s estate, leaving Emma and Lizzie to split the other two-thirds. By killing first Abby, then Andrew, Lizzie could ensure that she’d get half of the estate rather than just a third. This doesn’t sound like much difference in the form of a fraction, but from an estate estimated somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000, it could have added up to as much as $80,000, a considerable amount of money with a lot of buying power in 1892. But was that really enough money for a committed church volunteer to butcher her family and risk hanging for murder? Especially when she was almost certainly going to inherit plenty of money when her father died?

Many decide yes, it was enough, and they conclude it was money—along with Lizzie’s supposed desire to live a more lavish life than her father would allow—that makes the most believable motive for Lizzie to drive that hatchet into the skulls of Andrew and Abby. Although, most would say it wasn’t only about getting her half of that extra third of Andrew’s money. It was also about making sure her stepmother wouldn’t somehow talk Andrew into cutting Lizzie out completely.

Rumors of a Will

Many Borden observers have found it strange that someone with Andrew Borden’s self-made fortune, a man clearly shrewd and savvy in business, would have allowed himself to reach nearly 70 years of age without making out a will. It was a true head-scratcher, then and now, for a man so clearly protective of his wealth, and so set in his opinions on how his money should be spent, to not leave instructions for its disposition. Then again, being shrewd as he was, he surely knew how a probate court would, by law, split up his estate in the event of his death, and may have been well-satisfied with that. As Edward Radin pointed in his 1961 book on the case, if he was indeed content with how the court would handle the division of his estate, why would thrifty Andrew “spend money to draw up a will to say the same thing?”

Several hints that Andrew may have been thinking about drawing up a will show up in courtroom testimony and in witness statements. At the inquest, John Morse was asked whether Andrew had ever discussed the subject of a will with him, and Morse said that sometime within a year before the murders Andrew had told him, “He thought he should make some bequests for charitable purposes,” but “he did not say anymore one way or the other … I judged from that that he was intending to [make a will]. I drew my conclusions that he had not [yet] but was thinking about it.” When asked by Knowlton about any specific bequests, John said, “His farm over there, he was talking about the Old Ladies Home, ‘I don’t know but I would give them this if they would take it’.”

Even before the inquest, Officer Medley had interviewed Charles C. Cook, Andrew’s business manager who was in charge of the Andrew J. Borden building in the heart of the city. In the report Medley wrote up, he has Cook saying, “I do not think Mr. Borden had made a will, unless it has been made recently. I will tell you how I know. He came to my office one day when I was writing and waited until I finished. When I told him I was just writing a will, he said, ‘Charles, do you know that is something I have never done yet, but I must attend to it’.”

Oddly, when Cook took the stand at the preliminary hearing, he denied making any such statement to Officer Medley, and even denied that he had been writing a will at all during any conversation with Andrew. He also told a reporter for the Fall River Herald that “any statement attributed to him as to how Mr. Borden intended to dispose of his property was false.” Even considering that Lizzie and Emma were likely to become his new employers once they became official owners of the Andrew J. Borden building, it’s not clear why he would reverse himself, or why he might consider Andrew’s benign comment about wanting to make a will injurious to Lizzie’s claim of innocence.

Whatever the reason for Cook’s about-face, other newspapers were reporting that Andrew intended to make a will, and it seems that police Marshal Hilliard was the source of several of these reports. On August 13th, The New York Herald reported that “Chief Hilliard said to me today that Mr. Borden was about to make a will. This statement was made to the Chief by a man whose name he declines to mention. He avers, however, that the old gentleman had been at work making an inventory of his property during the ten days preceding his murder. Mr. Borden had even departed from his usual reticence about his own private affairs and had told Chief Hilliard’s informant that he intended to devise his property “according to his own ideas.”

Months later, The Boston Globe ran an article in February of 1893 with the headline “In Mrs. Borden’s Pocket: Bit of Paper Found Which May Be Important. Memorandum That Shows Her Interest in Mr. Borden’s Property.” The article states that “it is reported,” although it doesn’t say just who reported it, that Abby’s personal effects, including a piece of paper found in Abby’s pocket, were handed over by Emma and Lizzie to Abby’s “immediate heirs,” (probably her half-sister Sarah Whitehead). On the piece of paper was a list, presumably written by Abby, “of $80,000 worth of stocks in the Troy mill, the Merchants’ Manufacture Company and other first-class corporations.” Opposite a number of shares of Globe Street Railway was added the word “Sold.” The article says it is unknown if Andrew Borden dictated this list and speculates that Andrew might have been “contemplating giving his wife these stocks as her portion of his property, leaving the real estate to be divided between the daughters.” As it contained a “record of all Mr. Borden’s investments in local ventures … [the list] suggests that the money question was discussed occasionally in the household.”

It seems likely that Andrew was indeed thinking about making a will. But why that leads people to consider it a motive for murder seems presumptuous. Despite numerous fictional portrayals in books and movies of a contentious relationship between Andrew and Lizzie, back in 1892 there were no reports that there was any difficulty between father and daughter (well, unless you count the irascible opinions of Hiram Harrington), no suggestion of ill feeling between them, and no whispers of Andrew being displeased with Lizzie. So why is it assumed that Andrew would have set terms unfavorable to her? Why wouldn’t he be thinking of delineating generous terms to better ensure his daughters’ security after his passing? Just a few weeks earlier, he’d bought the Ferry Street house from Emma and Lizzie—a house he had originally gifted to them—for $2500 each, an amount Emma confirmed was more than it was worth.

Furthermore, Lizzie’s friend, Mrs. Mary Brigham told the Boston Post that Andrew had recently told his daughters to begin looking for a house in a better section of town. This assertion is supported by a note taken by Andrew Jennings, published in The Jennings Journals, who spoke to Mr. William Chace – of Durfee and Chace. ” Mr. AJB came to him after William Mason died and wanted the first show at the William Mason estate if it came to market, said he was getting older – then another time while walking by there he asked about it again and said he was getting old and wanted a nice place for his daughters.” Clearly, Lizzie didn’t have reason to worry about being cut out of his will.

Of course, the contention is not so much that Andrew was unlikely to be generous toward his daughters, but that, in Lizzie’s mind anyway, Abby could use her influence over Andrew to cut Lizzie out. Edward Radin finds this idea “ironic” when “after twenty-seven years of married life the major portion of Mrs. Borden’s estate consisted of her half-share in the small house for which her husband paid $1500, and her request for that had not been made on her own behalf but for her half-sister. In other words, Abby had never shown any sign of greed for herself, or for wanting to prevent largesse from Andrew to his daughters.” Furthermore, Andrew gave Abby the same allowance he gave Emma and Lizzie, so there is nothing in his history to suggest that Andrew would have favored his wife over his daughters when he wrote his will, even if Abby was once able to talk him into helping her sister.

Still, even if Abby wasn’t lusting for her husband’s money, Lizzie could have perceived her that way. Although she said at the inquest she didn’t know anything about her father making a will, if she’d somehow got wind of it, her mistrust for Abby (see Hatred) could have triggered a fear for her future security, whether those fears were reasonable or not. There has been endless speculation over the decades that Lizzie may have overheard some conversation between John Morse and Andrew in the sitting room, either the afternoon or evening before the murders, about Andrew making a will that would cut out Lizzie. This speculation has been fed not by any facts unearthed in the police investigation, nor from any sworn testimony in court, but by rumors printed in newspapers, such as a story that appeared in the New Bedford Evening Standard, on August 8th, 1892. The newspaper claimed to have uncovered information that Andrew planned to make a will which “would give the girls $25,000 a piece, and the residue of the estate would go to Mrs. Borden.”

According to the paper, Emma and Lizzie had learned about this supposed plan from their uncle, John Morse. But of course, Morse took the stand and said that he didn’t know anything about Andrew’s intentions in making a will other than thinking about charitable bequests (a plan that one would presume charity-minded Lizzie would have approved). If Morse had had any conversation with his brother-in-law the day before the murders about Andrew’s financial intentions regarding his daughters, that would mean he lied to investigators and perjured himself on the stand. Why would he do that? To cover for a niece he wasn’t close to in the murder of a man he liked quite well? How likely is that? John Morse never acted cagey on the stand but was always forthcoming when answering questions and was observed to be a veritable chatterbox to reporters, telling them anything they wanted to know, at least until Andrew Jennings told him to stop. If Lizzie did have concerns about her father making a will, although it’s unclear why she would, it wasn’t because of anything she learned through John Morse.

Did Lizzie Long for a More Lavish Lifestyle?

After reading a few books on the Borden Murders, the impression one gets of the Borden household is of small narrow house, cramped and dim and dreary, with musty old furniture long out of date. There was no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and no telephone in a time when the well-to-do, like Andrew Borden, were beginning to enjoy such amenities. Instead, Andrew, being a famous miser and penny-pincher, refused anything modern, made his family use kerosene lamps, toilet pails and slop pails, and forget about a bathtub. He didn’t want spend money on food either and made his family eat spoiled mutton for days on end.

Robinson addressed this idea of the Borden house in his closing, “Starved to death, they say; pinched so she could not live, wrought up to frenzy and madness, so that she would murder her own father for want of things.” But he reminded the jury they had been to the Borden House and had seen it was comfortable and pleasant. “You know well enough they were not poorly supplied, were not pinched and starved into doing this thing … Did she want any more to live on in comfort?” Good question.

It is also not true that Andrew Borden wasn’t willing to pay for decent food, a rumor that still upset his daughter Emma two decades later. In 1913, the only interview Emma was known to grant to a journalist appeared in the Boston Post, and she addressed the widely reported notion that Andrew was stingy with food by saying, “That is a wicked lie. He was a plain-mannered man, but his table was always laden with the best that the market could afford.”

Lizzie’s life certainly wasn’t difficult; Emma testified that, beyond the responsibility to tend to their own bedrooms, she and Lizzie had very little housework they were expected to do, “only what we felt like doing.” They had Bridget, a live-in maid, to do the heavy cleaning and to do their laundry. They didn’t have to cook for themselves, that was also Bridget’s job. They didn’t even have to shop for the food they ate. On the stand, Emma said she had no idea who went shopping for the food for the family, wherher it was her father or her stepmother; shew wasn’t even sure what store it came from. They each got an allowance of $4 a week to buy whatever they wished, and while that doesn’t sound like a lot now, it was more than Bridget earned for a week of 12-hours-a-day labor. As Mary Brigham also told the Boston Post, Lizzie “had more money than she needed. She had the best of clothes, her room was fitted luxuriously as a parlor and bedroom, and she bought books by the set rather than by the volume.”

Still, while Lizzie’s house was not lacking in basic comforts, it was not on the cutting edge of comfort either. There were nicer, bigger, more modern houses up on The Hill, where the elite of Fall River lived. Andrew, however, was not born a wealthy Borden as were many of his cousins; he was the son of a fishmonger and began his career as cabinet maker and then a carpenter, building coffins. Andrew had not yet made his fortune when Lizzie was born, but as she grew, her father slowly built enough wealth to qualify as an elite Borden by the time she reached her late 20s. That is likely when she began to realize that a different kind of life had come within reach. Yet, Andrew was apparently well-satisfied with his upper middle-class life on Second Street and wasn’t interested in moving up to a more fashionable address.

“Mr. Borden was a plain living man with rigid ideas, and very set,” said Alice Russell at the inquest. He had earned his money and he didn’t understand why his daughters “should care for anything different.” Andrew, said Alice, “did not care for the things that young women in their position naturally would; and he looked upon those things–I don’t know just how to put it.” She agreed with Knowlton that “Their ideas were more modern than his with regard to the way of living.” When asked if the girls complained, Alice answered, “Yes, they used to think it ought to be different; there was no reason why it should not be. They used to think it might be different.” Yet, she also told Knowlton that her impression was it wasn’t a cause of overt discontent between father and daughters as she had never heard either daughter speak of any “wrangling” with Andrew over it. Still, she did say that Emma and Lizzie “had quite refined ideas, and they would like to have been cultured girls, and would like to have had different advantages.” Alice considered it “natural for the girls to express themselves that way. I think it would have been very unnatural if they had not.” But, she added, “people cannot go and do and have, unless they have ample means to do it.” The implication here is that Andrew was obviously not using his money to give Emma and Lizzie the kind of life he could have afforded, the kind of life they longed for.

Mary Brigham confirmed that “both of the girls would have much preferred to live in this part of town to where they did, and often expressed the wish of course.” But she added that Emma and Lizzie “said that it was better for their father, and [more] convenient to live where they did, as it was near his business interests, and so they did not urge it. On the other hand, the father, knowing … of the wish, told them only a short time ago to look for a house in this neighborhood.” Mrs. Brigham presumably wouldn’t have said this unless she’d heard it directly from Emma and Lizzie, and if true, the Borden sisters must have had the expectation that they were about to move up in the world. If that was the case, then why, as Robinson asked, would she be “wrought up to frenzy and madness, so that she would murder her own father for want of things?”

Through the Lens of Guilt

While the prosecution did not have much to say at trial about Lizzie having a money motive to kill her father and stepmother, they certainly considered it. After all, they were given hints of it from the earliest days of the investigation. It was Mrs. Augusta Tripp, Lizzie’s friend, who related to Officer Medley a conversation she’d had with her younger sister, Carrie Pool, who told her that Lizzie said she feared she and Emma could be disinherited and presumably not be left anything, at least not if Abby had her say. (Mrs. Tripp admitted that she herself “never heard Lizzie say that,” so we don’t how Lizzie might have said it, whether it was a true fear or a joking prediction.) A rumor also circulated that a woman who claimed she was riding on a horsecar when she overheard Lizzie Borden talking to a friend. The woman claimed that Lizzie told her friend that someone, presumably her stepmother, “was the kind that never dies.”

Evidence that Lizzie was concerned with money also comes from Charles Cook, Andrew’s business manager, who said Lizzie had come to see him on her own to ask him about the value of the Ferry Street house Andrew had given her and was about to buy back from her. In the same vein, Edward Radin presented a story that appeared in the Fall River Globe under the headline, “Another link in the damaging chain of evidence that is being forged about Lizzie Borden.” The article claimed that Lizzie had consulted with a “well-known Providence lawyer six months before the murders and had discussed with him the disposition of certain property in the event of death,” property that was part of her father’s “large realty holdings.” However, the paper refused to divulge the lawyer’s name. (Radin claims a hunt for the lawyer by other reporters turned up nothing, and that eventually “the Globe dropped all mention of this story, tacitly admitting it had been untrue.”)

Today, many Borden murder buffs are certain that Lizzie, who, as Alice Russell said, longed to be a “cultured girl” and to “live differently,” was so consumed with fear that Abby was going to influence her father to cut her out of his will; or, at the very least, leave her so little she’d be stuck depending on Abby’s generosity, that it drove her to kill them both. The fact that she and Emma bought a much nicer house after Lizzie’s acquittal seems to support this idea. And so does the fact that Lizzie made sure to kill Abby first, thus denying Abby (and her family) any portion of Andrew’s estate.  

Killing for financial gain is one of the more common motives for murder, especially if you toss robberies gone bad into that bag. And although statistics and studies of motive show that while men are more likely to kill someone close to them for interpersonal reasons, such as jealousy or a fit of anger, the most likely reason a woman kills someone close to her? Money.

Through the Lens of Innocence

In the days after the murders, Lizzie was said to be perplexed as to why anyone would think she was the murderer, and especially why anyone would think she killed her father for his money. In his journal, Andrew Jennings made a notation under the name of Mrs. Mary Brigham, who spent a lot of time with Lizzie after the murders and before her arrest. “After the murder Lizzie showed her her money and bank books and said, why should I do it?”

Lizzie’s defense attorney also pointed out that Lizzie had plenty of money of her own. When they called Emma to the stand, the first thing they asked her to do was list all Lizzie’s assets so the jury would know that Lizzie had no reason to feel desperate for money. Robinson, in his closing, hit on the subject again, saying Lizzie was “worth, in her own right of money and personal property, from four to five thousand dollars.” This was not an inconsiderable amount for the day. Of course, whatever amount was in Lizzie’s bank account was small compared to what was in her father’s accounts. But again, we have to ask, do we think she was greedy for her father’s money because we presume her guilty, or do we think she’s guilty of her father’s murder because she displayed substantial evidence of greed? Other than Lizzie openly wishing to live in a nice house on The Hill, something a good many of the citizens of Fall River probably wished for as well, no evidence existed that Lizzie was unusually avaricious.  

As for the oft-repeated idea that Lizzie purposely killed Abby first to ensure that her stepmother wouldn’t be considered one of Andrew’s heirs, what are the odds that Lizzie, even if she was the killer, knew that Andrew and Abby’s times of death could be determined that accurately? Was she likely to be familiar with the way that blood coagulated over time? Would she have been able to guess that the medical examiner would immediately cut out the stomachs of both victims and be able to determine who died first by how long they’d each digested their breakfast? It is a far stretch to think Lizzie somehow calculated how the inheritance would play itself out and then commit the murders according to what would best profit her. To me, this idea supports a money motive not at all; rather, it nudges one in the direction of innocence. Would Lizzie have killed both Andrew and Abby for money if she knew there was a possibility that Abby’s half-sister, Sarah Whitehead, who Lizzie seems not to have liked, would end up with a third of her father’s wealth?

Author’s Take

Lizzie inherited half her father’s money, and if she was guilty of killing him and her stepmother, then it’s a reasonable motive. But she was almost certainly going to inherit a good deal of his money anyway, there was no reason to commit murder to get her hands on it. In fact, it could be argued that if Andrew had lived longer, he may have amassed even more wealth, and she would have been even better off in the long run. Of course, murder for financial gain is usually about the short-term, and if Andrew was getting ready to write a will, that theoretically could have been a catalyst for Lizzie to have some concern for her future security. But theoretic possibility is not the same as actual evidence.

First, Lizzie denied having any knowledge of Andrew’s intentions regarding a will, as did Emma on the stand, and what one sister knew or didn’t know was likely the same. Second, there is nothing in Andrew and Lizzie’s history that would justify Andrew disinheriting her. On the contrary, he seemed to dote on her as much as his stoic Yankee personality allowed; for example, allowing her (and not his wife) to choose the color of the new paint for the house just three months before the murders. And Lizzie apparently doted on him as much as her own version of a stoic Yankee personality allowed, and according to friends who knew her later in life, spoke frequently of him in fond terms until the day she died. I simply don’t see a compelling reason to believe Lizzie excessively worried for her inheritance, nor a compelling reason to believe she killed him to get ahold of it sooner rather than later.