Prince Albert Coat

In the remarkable crime scene photo taken of Andrew Borden, lying where he was killed on his sofa, his face disfigured and unrecognizable, one can see his head resting on a pillow. And, stuffed behind that pillow is a folded black coat, quite large. That coat was Andrew’s Prince Albert Coat, of which he was reportedly very fond and was said to wear every day on his business rounds downstreet in Fall River. As Dr. William Dolan, the medical examiner who arrived early on the scene described it, Andrew’s “head was resting on a sofa cushion that had a little white tidy on it. The cushion, I think, rested on his coat, which had been doubled up and put under there. And the coat in turn rested on an afghan or sofa cover.” The coat also rested on a folded newspaper on the arm of the chair.

In his closing argument for Lizzie’s guilt, District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, in trying to address how it was that Lizzie didn’t have any blood on her person only minutes after allegedly committing a blood-spraying murder, at last brought up Andrew’s coat.

“Did it ever occur to you, however, how remarkable it is that the coat which the old man took off, which I presume he took off, at any rate whether that coat or another, instead of being hung upon a nail, as a prudent old man would have hung it, was folded up underneath his cushion? That might have been used. I can’t tell. There are plenty of ways in which a woman can conceal that sort of thing.”

At the time this seemed a throwaway line, another haphazard suggestion that followed on the heels of Knowlton’s conjecture that perhaps Lizzie had covered herself in paper to do the killing and then burned the paper. Certainly, Knowlton’s remark about the coat didn’t seem to spark any sudden curiosity about it or where it might have gone. News reporters didn’t rush to ask police to answer for the coat, or to ask where it went or why they didn’t keep track of it. After that one mention in court … nothing again.

But, in the decades since, Knowlton’s conjecture has become more or less accepted by those who think Lizzie guilty. It is now usually taken for granted that Lizzie did indeed use that Prince Albert Coat to protect her dress from blood while killing her father, then folded it up and stuffed it behind his head. They have good reasons to believe so, as Andrew seems to have been known to hang the coat in the dining room closet when he returned home and exchange it for his house jacket, or “reefer” as Lizzie called it. Bridget testified that he went straight to the dining room when she let him through the front door that morning, and although she said nothing about him changing out of his coat, it would appear that is when he would have changed into the house jacket he was wearing when he was found dead.   

Then there was Andrew’s reputation for fastidiousness, which allowed writers like Lincoln to utterly reject that Andrew Borden would have laid his head on his beloved coat to nap. “Even an untidy man would not have wadded it in like that; he would simply have tossed it to one side. And Andrew was not untidy. He was famous for his meticulous neatness and for his methodical habit and his miserliness. There was a coat rack in the hall, a step away. It was unthinkable that a man with a horror of unnecessary presser’s bills would not have hung his coat there.”

Writer after writer has followed Lincoln’s lead, asserting with authority that Andrew religiously hung his coat in the hall closet when he came home (he didn’t, it was the dining room, but no matter), and that he would never, never fold up his coat and stick it under his head for a nap. And this, to them, is one more piece of evidence that the coat was moved and obviously worn by Lizzie and ultimately proves Lizzie guilty.

Which is why it is so maddening to students of the case today that police officers didn’t seem to give the slightest attention to it, let alone gather it up as evidence. They were far more intent on grabbing up bloody pieces of carpets and baseboards, as if those things could tell them anything they didn’t already know. So why not bag up the coat right next to the murdered man’s head? Why not take the time to examine it, see what kind of blood stains might have been on it? Or at the very least ask a question or two of Lizzie or Bridget about it? And, if Knowlton was going to bring it up in court, why do it in such an offhand manner, why not put some thought and care into it, why not support it with facts gleaned from actual investigating?

Author’s Take

In many ways, Andrew’s Prince Albert Coat is emblematic of the entire case built against Lizzie, a collection of theories that authorities satisfied themselves with but didn’t make the necessary effort to prove to others (such as the jury). But whether the police deserve such criticism or not, the fact that they didn’t pay any attention to the coat at the time seems in itself something of a clue. Today, many look at that coat in the crime scene photo and it strikes them as glaringly, and suspiciously, out of place. Why? Because we have been told time and time again that fastidious Andrew Borden would never have folded up his coat and lay his head on it for a nap. Says who? Victoria Lincoln, writing 70 years later? It would be good to know if there was anyone in 1892 who actually knew Andrew and his habits that made a point of saying that he would not have folded up his coat like that. It seems to me that on the day of the murders a lot of people saw that coat and thought nothing of it, and a lot of those people knew Andrew personally. So why didn’t it jump out at them?

Of course, if Lizzie Borden was indeed guilty of the murders, then it’s not unreasonable to wonder if she used her father’s coat to protect her clothing. Speculating about the head-scratching details of the murders is part of what makes the case so absorbing to ponder. I remember well my own moment of excitement when I heard the theory of the Prince Albert Coat, and my following thought of, oh that’s how she did it! It seemed such a clever solution to Lizzie’s dilemma, protecting her clothes from the flying blood. And those who thought of it and explained it so convincingly struck me as clever, too.

But somewhere along the way I realized that just because we can make a clever argument for something, doesn’t make it true. I sometimes imagine Lizzie wearing that coat to kill her father, then stopping a moment to catch her breath. Then I imagine her setting the hatchet down, taking off the coat, folding it up and then … I can’t get past that moment, the moment where she lifts the ruined head of the father she just butchered so she can shove the coat underneath it. It is one thing to kill from the distance of a foot or two, she could have done it with her eyes mostly closed. But to take one’s bare hands and pick up a freshly mangled head still profusely bleeding? If she did so, she was made of very stern stuff indeed. (Okay, maybe she only had to lift up the pillow beneath his head, but still.) Yet, such a scenario is in conflict with the actual record in which Lizzie was noticeably reluctant to even step into the sitting room once she saw her father dead. She was, in fact, criticized for being unwilling to touch him when she discovered him bleeding on the sofa to determine whether he was still alive or dead. (Having discovered the body of a dead and bloodied parent myself at an age very close to Lizzie’s at that time, and not being able to make myself go into that room, I can sympathize.)

However, my primary problem with the common conjecture about the Prince Albert Coat is when people talk about its presence beneath Andrew’s head as if it’s some kind of proof of Lizzie’s guilt. We have no idea what Andrew’s habits were, let alone what might make him stray from his habits on any particular day. It is entirely possible that Andrew sometimes folded up his coat beneath his head to take a nap. We don’t know. It’s also entirely possible that Andrew usually hung his coat in the closet, but for some reason decided to fold it up and put it beneath his head that day. Perhaps he still wasn’t feeling well, not quite recovered from his stomach ailment, and thought to give his head an extra lift to help keep his stomach calm. Shown the photograph of the body, Dr. Dolan pointed out how Andrew’s head had sagged lower onto the pillow from when he first saw it; the head was no longer propped high on the arm of the sofa as it had been.

It’s also entirely possible that Lizzie killed her father, but never thought of using the coat, or thought of it but couldn’t use it because it was already wedged under Andrew’s head. We just don’t know; nobody knows the real reason that coat was folded under his head, despite whatever certainty they might feel. In the end, the mystery of who killed the Bordens will not be solved by a coat that itself mysteriously disappeared.