Premeditation

When Lizzie Borden stood trial for the murders of her father and stepmother, the prosecution was clear they believed the crime to be premeditated. They certainly had good reason to believe she had been planning to kill Andrew and Abby: Within just nine hours of the crime, a druggist by the name of  Eli Bence told police that Lizzie had been in his store the day before asking to buy prussic acid, the fatal poison we know today as cyanide. Police escorted Bence to Lizzie’s house and had him step into the kitchen to get a look at Lizzie, where he positively identified her as the woman who had asked him for poison the day before. A week later, at the inquest, his assertion was corroborated by two other men, Frederick Hart and Frank Kilroy, who were in the shop that day and who also said they were certain Lizzie was the woman they witnessed asking for the poison. Within another month or two, police would suggest they found a druggist, maybe two, in New Bedford who were ready to testify that Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid when she had visited the city two weeks before the murders. Taken together, this was clear and convincing evidence that Lizzie had been harboring an “intent” to kill her parents, preferably with poison, for at least two weeks.

Whether the jury was swayed by Lizzie’s prophecy or not, those who study the case today are likely to interpret it as a clear indication that she was premeditating murder. They are also likely to believe that Lizzie’s alleged request to buy poison, admissible in court or not, was tantamount to proof she was determinedly hatching a plan to do away with her father and stepmother.

From Poison to Hatchet

The judges who blocked the testimony from Eli Bence believed that because there was no evidence that victims had been poisoned, any attempt by Lizzie to buy the stuff had no bearing on whether she murdered Andrew and Abby with a hatchet. But most who delve into the case today are of a different mind. It seems clear to many that it was only because Lizzie was unsuccessful in her quest for poison, the typical method of murder for a woman to choose, that she instead chose a hatchet to kill her parents.

Yet, a hatchet is more challenging to work with when it comes to asserting premeditated murder. No hardware store clerk came forward, as Eli Bence did, to say that Lizzie Borden had recently purchased a hatchet at his store. All the hatchets known to be owned by Andrew Borden and kept in the Borden cellar had been accounted for. The Handleless Hatchet offered by the prosecution as a “possible” weapon was so discredited during the trial that the press dubbed it the “Hoodoo Hatchet,” and not many today who look into the case consider it the actual murder weapon. Indeed, most people who believe Lizzie guilty will contend that she was able to successfully hide the actual weapon in the house or perhaps flung it up onto the Crowe barn over her back fence.

Yet, to prove Lizzie premeditated the murders, the question of where the offending hatchet went to is not as important as the question of where it came from, as well as how long she had it in her possession, and these questions remain unanswered. Not that there hasn’t been plenty of conjecture. Thanks to Lizzie’s rumored reputation as a shoplifter, some assume she stole the hatchet. Others point to another rumor that was much talked about in newspapers in the weeks after the murders of Lizzie bragging, or perhaps joking, about having a sharp new axe in a letter to her friend Elizabeth Johnston. But unsubstantiated rumors aside, there is no evidence that Lizzie ever owned a hatchet, or kept one in her possession, or had even so much as touched a hatchet.

Furthermore, other than her prediction of doom to Alice Russell, there were no signals that she was feeling like she needed to be rid of her father and stepmother, no threats made against them, no open musings about how she wished they were dead or that her life would be better without them. And there were no words of contention spoken between Lizzie and her parents that anyone in the Borden sphere heard about or witnessed. The only real difficulty Lizzie and her parents were known to have had, over a piece of property Andrew had gifted Abby, happened five years earlier, and even then, strong words were never exchanged. It is true that Lizzie had on occasion been open with her opinion that her stepmother was “deceptive” or “mean,” but by all accounts they tolerated each other well enough and remained cordial. So, despite the prosecution’s claim that Lizzie harbored a rabid hatred for Abby, there is not a great deal of evidence to support it. And certainly Lizzie was never known to say a negative word about her father, either before or after his death.

Indeed, up until the bodies were discovered, there had been no sign of discord in the house and no known event that caused stress or disagreement. Bridget Sullivan, the live-in maid, said that as far as she knew, there was no trouble brewing and relations had been “civil” inside the house. Everything had apparently been normal the preceding week except for a likely bout of food poisoning (or perhaps a virulent stomach virus) that shook-up both Abby and Lizzie and had them crying “Poison!” to others. So, how to prove premeditation for the hatchet murders?

Can There be Premeditation Without a Plan?

Further complicating the likelihood of premeditation, or a planned-ahead murder, is that there were unexpected things happening in the Borden house on August 4th, the family’s shaky recovery from their recent illness being only one. There was also an unexpected visitor to the house the night before, Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, who had spent the night and, although he had gone out in the morning to visit relatives, was expected back for the noon meal. That Morse had slept in the guest room the previous night was the only reason that Abby had gone up into that room, a room she reportedly didn’t often enter, to make the bed, making it another unusual occurrence that Lizzie could not have foreseen. Plus, Bridget being out of the house and out of earshot half-the-morning to wash windows was also not something Lizzie could have counted on, as it was not a set chore for her that day and was given to her last minute.

So, if Lizzie had plotted to murder Andrew and Abby on that day but could not have known beforehand that Abby would be in the guest room, where had she planned to kill her? Was she simply keeping a secret hatchet hidden in her room in case Abby happened to venture upstairs at some point? What if Abby hadn’t gone up to the guest room that morning at all? Is the assumption that Lizzie would have grabbed the hatchet anyway and cut her down right there in the dining room or kitchen as soon as Bridget went outside? Or would she not have killed Abby or Andrew that day? What if Abby hadn’t gone upstairs at all until Emma returned home from her trip to Fairhaven? Would Lizzie have said, oh never mind?

That brings us to Andrew. Even if Lizzie did kill Abby that day, how was she able to go about her business after murdering Abby with utter certainty she would be able to kill Andrew, too? What if he came home later than usual, with business associates to speak to, or for some other reason didn’t take a nap that day? Would she have tried to attack him head on?  What if John Morse had returned from his foray downtown earlier, before Andrew took a nap? What if Bridget hadn’t finished washing windows as early as she did and was still hanging around downstairs while Andrew napped? How could Lizzie have planned for any of these things?

But perhaps a detailed plan wasn’t necessary, at least so long as a hatchet was ready and within easy reach, and luck was on her side (e.g., Abby’s ascent upstairs). Even if Abby’s murder wasn’t premeditated, Andrew’s murder would have been (uncertainties notwithstanding), and she would have had over an hour to do the planning. If so, she did a crackerjack job of figuring out how to keep herself free of blood and ditch the weapon so no one would ever find it—within an incredibly narrow time window of thirteen minutes. But for someone who succeeded so brilliantly at those after-murder tasks, she did a terrible job of obscuring her guilt afterward. 

One would expect that someone who had just committed murder wouldn’t immediately call for help at “discovery” of the body but would instead get herself out of the house and into places where people could see her in order to establish an alibi. Or, that she might unlock the front door to give an intruder a second plausible path of entry and escape. Or, that she wouldn’t have made up easily disproven stories like “the Note” she said Abby received from a sick friend. Or, that she would stick to one story instead of continually changing her tune about where she was when her father came home or why she went out to the barn. One might also expect that instead of placing herself in the kitchen (in direct sight of the only unlocked entry point for an intruder), she would have said she went down to the cellar for awhile or was upstairs reading in her room behind a closed door. One especially might think she would weep as police officers questioned her, act the grief-stricken daughter, instead of standing before them stone-faced, making them think her heartless. As Rachel McCarthy James wrote in Whack Job: A History of Axe Murder, Lizzie’s “project management of the murder is either pristine or non existent,” which was one reason she concluded that Lizzie probably wasn’t guilty.

Of course, an intruder would have needed a great deal of luck to pull off the murders as well. But his only premeditated plan essentials would have been: 1) getting in and out of the house without being seen by anyone outside, 2) possible hiding places while waiting for his intended target to be vulnerable, and 3) the willingness to eliminate any witnesses who he came across in the meantime.

Author’s Take

It’s not easy to tell from Knowlton’s dramatic soliloquy whether he believed Lizzie premeditated either one or both of the murders. But that’s what he charged her with, even if he himself couldn’t quite justify the premeditation part, at least not with a hatchet.

From where I sit, if Lizzie killed her father and stepmother, I don’t see much room for careful premeditation; there were just too many variables at play on that day for Lizzie to be able to plan around. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t experimenting in her mind with how she might be rid of them—especially if Bence, Kilroy, and Hart were correct in their identification of Lizzie at the drug store. And her prediction of doom to her friend Alice Russell is also not easy to dismiss as a coincidence. But it seems to me actual evidence of her premeditating that particular hatchet murder on that particular morning is lacking, and hard to reconcile with “conditions on the ground,” so to speak. If she was indeed the killer, it seems to me she had to have been winging it the entire way.

But do those two grisly murders, done so quietly that no one else on that busy street heard a sound, and accomplished so cleanly that there wasn’t a single drop of blood found anywhere else in the house, truly appear to be the work of a novice killer who was winging it? I have reasonable doubt.