Prussic Acid: Mistaken Identity

When Eli Bence, a druggist who worked at D.R. Smith’s drug store in Fall River, was called to the stand at the trial of Lizzie Borden to testify that Lizzie had come into his store and asked to buy 10 cents worth of an extremely lethal poison, one might expect that Lizzie would shrink back in her seat. But, according to The Boston Globe, she did no such thing. As Bence was taking the oath, the newspaper reported, “Miss Borden fairly glared at him, leaned forward and stared squarely at him.” This so rattled Bence that he “blushed and stammered as he hurriedly replied, I do.” Indeed, Lizzie seemed not at all shamed by the accusation she knew Bence intended to make; rather, she seemed outraged, or at least as outraged as Lizzie permitted herself to appear in public. At the preliminary hearing, she had been equally unbowed by Bence’s appearance on the stand and was overheard by a reporter for The Fall River Globe to whisper loudly, “I was never in that man’s store in my life!”

Bridget, too, would testify that she saw Lizzie “around the house” that morning—she had seen her at breakfast, and again later in the morning, before Bridget put the noon meal on the table, and that as far as she knew, Lizzie hadn’t gone anywhere in between. The maid also remembered the dress Lizzie wore that Wednesday morning, saying it was a light blue “basque and loose skirt with a belt around it,” and that she was wearing it both at breakfast and at the noon meal. (Bence, Hart, and Kilroy all said the woman who asked for prussic acid wore a “dark dress,” and that it was not blue.) However, Bridget also allowed that she couldn’t be certain Lizzie was actually upstairs in her room in the hours between breakfast and dinner, saying only, “I don’t remember seeing her.” So, it’s possible Lizzie could have slipped out of the house, and then crept back inside a little later, without Bridget or Abby noticing the front door opening and closing. But is it probable?

Reasons to Believe Lizzie

Because Bridget saw Lizzie in the same dress, the prosecution had no choice but to imply that Lizzie removed the blue dress Bridget saw her wearing that morning at breakfast, changed into a “going out” dress (which had to have been a dark colored dress in order to match the description given by Eli Bence and his friends), put on a hat, then secretly left the house on a quest for poison. In other words, she had been able to sneak out, then sneak back into 92 Second Street, then change her dress back to what she had been wearing before, all without the three other people inside the house becoming aware she had come and gone. Nor did anyone outside the home notice her leave the house, walk downstreet, or walk back up the street to return to the house that Wednesday morning. And, perhaps that was true, and she was able to pull that off and stay invisible to those around her as she came and went.

However, the prosecution was also building a murder case against Lizzie based, in part, on the supposed impossibility of an intruder being able to go in and out of the house undetected by those either inside the house (Lizzie and Bridget), or those outside the house in neighboring homes or passing by on the street. Which begs the question, why is it reasonable to conclude Lizzie was successfully able to do it on Wednesday, but an intruder couldn’t possibly have done it on Thursday? Was it possible to go in and out of the house unnoticed or was it not? If we accept the prosecution’s argument that an intruder would have had an overwhelmingly difficult time getting in or out of the house without being noticed by others, we also have to accept that Lizzie would have had a difficult time of it as well. Her challenge would have perhaps been greater because while the intruder would have been an anonymous anyone attracting no notice, Lizzie was recognizable to the people who populated Second Street.

Furthermore, Kilroy, and Hart recalled that the woman who asked for prussic acid had a sealskin cape or “sack” over her arm. Lizzie did own such capes, as did many well-to-do women, but they were not kept in her room or in the clothes press across the hall in the summer. Lizzie’s capes were stored in the attic at that time of year, an attic accessible only by the back stairs. So even if she could somehow sneak in and out of the front door without anyone inside the house knowing (debatable, as we will see below), is it reasonable to suppose she was able to go through the kitchen and up the back stairs, past Andrew and Abby’s room, all the way up to the attic to fetch her cape and then come back down again without Andrew or Abby noticing? Or without Bridget, who regularly did her ironing in the kitchen on Wednesday mornings, noticing either?

Next, there is the problem of Andrew and Abby’s whereabouts in the house that day. They had both been very ill the night before, vomiting so loudly that Lizzie told her friend Alice she had knocked on the door between their rooms and asked if she could help. One therefore imagines both Andrew and Abby lying in bed upstairs all morning, trying to recover. Yet, Dr. Bowen showed up at the house that morning after breakfast and found Andrew in the sitting room, lying on the sofa. Jonathan Clegg testified that he also visited the house that day to speak to Andrew about business and, although he didn’t specify the time he arrived, said he spoke to Andrew in the front entry. Dr. Bowen also said he saw Andrew in the Borden yard later that Wednesday morning, “two or three hours” after he’d spoken to him after breakfast, and noted that Andrew was “walking between the screen door and the gate.” At the preliminary hearing, Bowen also recalled that “my wife said he was out on the sidewalk” sometime that morning. Clearly, Andrew was not upstairs lying abed all morning; he was downstairs, likely in the sitting room (when John Morse arrived in the early afternoon, he said he also found Andrew lying on the sofa in the sitting room), still conducting business with a new tenant, going out into the yard and, as he was seen by Mrs. Bowen out on the sidewalk, perhaps even heading downstreet in the same direction Lizzie would have had to leave and return. This means that while the opportunity for Lizzie to slip in and out of the house unnoticed was certainly there, it was probably not as easy as the Lizzie-Did-It folks imagine.

Still, the three men at D.R. Smith’s drug store declared themselves “positive” it was Miss Lizzie Borden they saw in that store, and that eyewitness identification must be reckoned with by those trying to determine whether Lizzie was guilty of the murders or not.

Could the Witnesses Have Been Mistaken?

While Eli Bence was prevented from testifying at Lizzie’s trial, he did appear at both the inquest and the preliminary hearing, and he told his story under oath there. He recalled that he had recognized Lizzie when she came into the store, as he had seen her on the street a number of times and had perhaps waited on her years earlier at a different drug store where he was previously employed. But he also said he did not know her as anyone other than “Miss Borden” until after she had left the store, and his friend Frank Kilroy told him “that was the daughter of Andrew J. Borden.” (Kilroy would later say he knew this only from seeing her on the street and being told by someone else who she was.)

“Jennings’ subsequent investigation turned up two instances that would call into question Bence’s certainty about his identification: According to one Jas. Taussiq, ‘Bence once made a bet that this Taussiq was killed in an accident that he himself witnessed.’ When he next saw Taussiq, Bence reportedly told him: “I was never so much surprised at seeing you come in here.” A druggist at a different pharmacy recounted another story Bence had told him: Bence “mistook a person in Boston & hit him & like got arrested for it.”

Roberton also pointed out there were “two other instances of women seeking prussic acid on the Monday before the murders.” On August 6th, 1892, The New York Times reported that one Hypolyte Martel, a clerk for a druggist on Pleasant Street in Fall River, had related the following story: On Monday, August 1st, three days before the murders, “Martel was approached in the store by a young lady who wanted to buy arsenic from him and was willing to give any price for it. The clerk told her that as the druggist was not present, he could not possibly comply with her wishes, whereupon she went out much disappointed. She returned twenty minutes later and asked for prussic acid. The article was again refused her with the advice to return when the druggist would be back from dinner.” She did not return, but Martel described her as 26 years old and 150 pounds (a description that could apply to Lizzie). He also claimed that “he would recognize her if he saw her again.” (If so, one wonders why Martel wasn’t also dragged by police to the Borden house, as Eli Bence had been, to identify Lizzie?)

Meanwhile, another paper, the Fall River Herald, reported that same woman had visited Corneau & Letourneau’s drug store, also on Pleasant Street, the same day, Monday, August 1st. Robertson explained that it was “found out afterward” that this woman was likely part of State Inspector McCaffrey’s sting operation that was going on in Fall River that week, in which McCaffrey sent women “spotters” to ask for illegal substances. While the Herald article suggested the woman looked like Lizzie Borden, another paper, The Fall River Globe of August 8th, stated that claim was absurd. “Mr. Bence may be mistaken, of course, but State Inspector McCaffrey’s partner looks about as much like Miss Borden as she does like John L. Sullivan.”

While these reports of other women asking for poisons around the same time as a reported sting operation conducted by McCaffrey does give one pause, it is unlikely that it was one of McCaffrey’s operatives who walked into D.R. Smith’s on Wednesday morning. First, according to an article in the Fall River Daily Evening News of August 15th, McCaffrey was the state inspector of milk and adulterated food products and typically sent his spotters to ask for food items, mostly “butterine” (a kind of margarine) or face lotions that McCaffrey would then have analyzed. Second, there is little doubt Lizzie’s defense team would have consulted with McCaffrey to discover if any of his spotters had been into D.R. Smith’s that day. The fact that the sting operation did not come up in any judicial proceedings indicates they already knew they could not rely on that explanation.

Nonetheless, the stories from other druggists who said that a woman had been in their stores on Monday, shopping for poisons, a woman who was not Lizzie Borden, a woman apparently not part of a sting operation, tells us that another woman in town was out and about on the very same task that Lizzie was accused of undertaking two days later. Was that simply an odd coincidence? Or could the men at D.R. Smith’s mistaken that same woman for Lizzie?

Was There a Lizzie Lookalike in Fall River?

It was probably Lizzie’s lawyer, Andrew Jennings, who tipped off the press to a story that appeared in the New Bedford Standard Times on October 5, 1892. Printed under the headline “Miss Lizzie’s Double. Curious Case of Mistaken Identity in a Pawnbroker’s Shop,” the story described a proprietor of a “real estate office” that negotiated loans for “valuable property,” a man who said he knew the Borden family well, and who also happened to occupy an office in the same building as Jennings’ office. One evening, this man “was surprised to see a woman who, he felt sure, was Lizzie Borden enter his office.” He discussed with her the transaction she was interested in making, and “it was not until he escorted her to the door that he discovered his mistake. It was not Lizzie Borden but a young married woman whose face and figure were so like Andrew Borden’s daughter that he had been deceived.” The article continued with the conjecture that the story “will be told on the witness stand before the strange case is finished.” And perhaps if Eli Bence’s testimony hadn’t been ruled inadmissible, this proprietor would have indeed made an appearance to tell his story of this lookalike woman.

Julian Ralph of the New York Sun also observed during the jury trial that many women he saw resembled Lizzie. “The strangers who are here begin to notice that Lizzie Borden’s face is of a type quite common in New Bedford. They meet Lizzie Borden every day and everywhere about town. Some are fairer, some are younger, some are coarser, but all have the same general cast of features—heavy in the lower face, high in the cheekbones, wide at the eyes, and with heavy lips and a deep line on each side of the mouth.” In his 1961 book, Radin agreed there was a “recognizable facial type” in that part of Massachusetts, the result of “frequent intermarriages within a small group of families.”

At first glance, the suggestion of a Lizzie lookalike walking around Fall River to ask for poison seems a grasp at straws by those who so fervently want to believe in Lizzie’s innocence that they will entertain any farfetched idea. Yet, Bence was right in one thing, it is indeed a “matter of common experience” among humans to mistake one person for another, and most of us have found ourselves surprised to have made that mistake in our own lives—or at least we have had to give a hard look at someone because they so resemble someone else we know. Most of us have also been told (as this writer has numerous times), “Oh my goodness, you must have a twin, you look just like a woman I used to work with!” Thus, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Lizzie may have shared similar features with other women in town. As Sarah Miller pointed out in The Borden Murders, there were 125 families which bore the last name of Borden in Fall River in 1892, and all shared at least some fraction of the same genes.

Yet, even if it was a lookalike that fooled the three men at D.R. Smith’s into mistakenly identifying Lizzie, why wouldn’t this woman come forward to set the record straight? There could, of course, be any number of reasons why this theoretical woman did not to come forward. Perhaps she was merely passing through town and missed hearing the news. Perhaps she did hear the news and simply didn’t want to get involved for personal reasons, such as a fear of attention. Or, perhaps she would have liked to come forward but suffered some kind of accident or health disaster. Or, perhaps, if she was the woman said by druggist Martel to be shopping for poisons a few days earlier, she was working on her own plot to get rid of an unwanted family member. Or, perhaps she actually succeeded on getting her hands on prussic acid somewhere else, and, underestimating its deadly effects, ended up causing her own demise. One can come up with any host of reasons. But, of course, speculative possibilities are not evidence, and eyewitness testimony is.

Interestingly, when George Robinson went to work to convince the judges of the inadmissibility of the prussic acid testimony he didn’t say a word about mistaken identity. He argued only against the prosecution’s position that the alleged attempt to purchase the poison showed “murderous intent,” pointing out that an attempt to buy prussic acid to clean a sealskin cape—which was not a crime and showed only an intent to kill moths—would tell the jury nothing about any intent Lizzie might have had to kill Andrew and Abby with a hatchet. The Lizzie-Did-It camp often interprets this to mean that Robinson accepted that she did try to buy the poison and wanted to prevent the jury from hearing about it. But it’s clear from the warm relationship that developed between Robinson and his client—not to mention his burst of joy when she was found not guilty—that Robinson believed Lizzie innocent and thus home sick the day before the murders as she claimed.

In the end, Robinson was simply taking on the prosecution and beating them at their own game. But, if he had lost the game, and Eli Bence’s testimony accusing Lizzie of trying to buy poison had been allowed, it is almost certain he would have tried to make a case for mistaken identity. And if he had known the statistics of how often this happens in criminal cases, and the reasons eyewitnesses can be prone to identifying the wrong person, he might have been successful.

The Odds of Mistaken Identity

Mistaken identification is the most common reason for any wrongful conviction, the prevalence of which is estimated to be up to five percent of all convictions In the United States, depending on region, at least according to a 2022 review published in The Sage Journal. And that is a modern estimate, when law enforcement has much more sophisticated crime-solving tools at their disposal than they did in Lizzie Borden’s day. A 2020 study of DNA exonerations found that “eyewitness misidentification” was responsible for the erroneous verdict in 69 percent of the cases that were overturned.

Mistaken identifications clearly happen, and they can happen even when several witnesses are in agreement. In fact, because of a cognitive bias called “social proof,” having several witnesses can make it easier for each witness to feel more certain of their identification than they might admit to being otherwise. We humans evolved relying on group dynamics to survive and we now possess an inborn tendency to accept the group’s actions as correct, a propensity which saves us a great deal of mental energy and stress. It also makes it psychologically difficult to be the one to go against the group; we are drawn toward conforming to consensus. Once Eli Bence identified Lizzie as the woman in the store, and police officers patted him on the back for it (we know they already suspected her), then newspapers blared the news to the entire city the next morning, so an unconscious social proof bias could have subtly, or even not so subtly, influenced Kilroy and Hart to see exactly what Bence saw when they came face-to-face with Lizzie in a courtroom.

This leads us to another bias, known as “authority bias,” which often shows up in criminal investigations and could have impacted Eli Bence’s original identification of Lizzie, as well as Kilroy and Hart’s courthouse identifications. This bias refers to our psychological tendency to uncritically trust or attribute greater credibility to figures in positions of power—figures such as police officers and prosecutors. This issue is known to plague the accuracy of police lineups and other forms of eyewitness identification. We cannot help but pick up on cues from the person in authority who is asking for the identification, whether from body language or tone of voice, about who that person expects us to choose. Earlier that afternoon, Officer Harrington had already made it clear to his superiors that he suspected Lizzie in the murders, so one can guess that his cues to Bence (hoping he would identify Lizzie) might not have been all that subtle.

Furthermore, Bence acknowledged in court that he previously knew both Harrington and Doherty; in fact, he agreed that he knew them well. So, they were not just authority figures to him, they also might have been friends of a sort, which would have put both authority bias and social proof bias into play. As psychologist Dr. Robert Caildini explained in his book, Influence: Science and Practice, when both forces combine—a group validating a belief that is also advocated by an authority figure—that message becomes incredibly challenging to resist.

This doesn’t mean that the witnesses who testified that they saw Lizzie Borden in D.R. Smith’s that day were mistaken; or, even if they were, that those men were purposely lying about seeing who they thought was Lizzie. Most cases of mistaken identity are “honest mistakes” made by people who feel confident in what they saw. That is why, according to a 2003 academic paper entitled Eyewitness Testimony, “psychologists have long been warning the justice system of the problems with eyewitness identification.” The authors note there are numerous “weaknesses” in such testimony, stemming from factors that include “characteristics of the witness, characteristics of the witnessed event, characteristics of testimony, lineup content, and lineup instructions.”

Of course, Lizzie was not put in a lineup at all for Eli Bence; they brought him into her house the very night of the murders, without her knowledge or permission, and had him stand inside the back doorway while Officer Harrington called Lizzie into the kitchen and asked her a few questions so that Bence could hear her speak when she answered. Frederick Hart only affirmatively identified Lizzie at the police station as she emerged from a room in the company of Marshal Hilliard after her inquest testimony. District Attorney Knowlton then asked him on the stand if he had seen “that woman” before. Meanwhile, Frank Kilroy, the man who first told Bence he believed the woman who had just been in the store was “Andrew J. Borden’s daughter,” a woman he admitted he didn’t know himself but had only “seen on the street,” a woman he said he only saw from behind while talking to Bence at the counter except for when she was entering and exiting, was never given the chance to identify her at all until he was on the stand at the preliminary hearing.

Not one of these identifications of Lizzie were set up in a spirit of objectivity; rather, they were set up in prime conditions for each witness to be influenced by various kinds of cognitive bias. Their story about Lizzie was already well in motion by that point, the public well-informed of it, the police investiation fueled by it, and the entire legal system moving along in support of it. There is no doubt it would have caused them a great deal of discomfort to contradict police and prosecutor, or even to admit to a particle of doubt for fear of making the police, or themselves, or the other two witnesses look wrong.

Additionally, if another factor in mistaken identity is the “characteristics of the witnessed event,” we have plentiful evidence that events which attract a lot of notoriety, such as the Borden murders, are also more likely to attract witnesses caught up in the excitement of unfolding events. Many such witnesses want to be part of the solution to the case, and in their zeal to “help” they can jump to the wrong conclusions about what they’ve seen or heard. Likewise, cases that are daily dragged into the glare of media attention put special pressure on law enforcement to solve the case, and every police officer wants to be the one to find the clue that identifies the killer.

We cannot know if Eli Bence’s original identification of Lizzie was a case of a man eager to please police officers who were just as eager to believe him. But even without such a shockingly brutal crime to create a rush to judgment, human memory is famously fallible and malleable, as many experiments done on the quirks of memory can attest. People can, and often do, sincerely remember things that never happened; they also can, and often do, recast what happened in their memory to support a wanted outcome or previously held belief.

In the end, the above considerations gleaned from our more modern understanding of the prevalence of mistaken identity, along with the psychological forces that underlie the phenomenon, introduce at least some measure of reasonable doubt that the three men at the drug store correctly identified Lizzie. Of course, we do not know what else may have come out at trial if the pharmacists from New Bedford had been allowed to take the stand. They might have also claimed, as most people expected them to do, that Lizzie had also walked into their store(s) with a request for 10 cents worth of prussic acid, and that would have certainly made an argument for mistaken identity a bigger uphill battle.

Then again, if the testimony had been allowed, the defense would have had a chance to confront it, and they seemed to have had a knack for taking apart assertions put forth by the prosecution that didn’t stand up to facts (such as their story of the Handleless Hatchet, or the story of Officer Medley’s dust experiment in the barn, or the story told by Hannah Reagan of Lizzie’s supposed “jailhouse confession.”) Each of the men from the drug store would have also had to face questions from Governor Robinson, with his famous way of making witnesses feel understood, feel comfortable. Perhaps he would have been able to uncover some uncertainty in the minds of those men, perhaps not. But it would have been fascinating to see him try.

Author’s Take

In my job as a screenwriter, I once wrote a movie called, The Wronged Man (2010), which was based on the true story of a Louisiana paralegal, Janet “Prissy” Gregory, who fought for years to overturn the conviction of a man in prison for the assault and rape of a child. The man, Calvin Willis, was eventually exonerated by DNA evidence after spending 21 years in prison for something he didn’t do. This wrongful conviction was the result of police officers influencing their one eyewitness to identify the wrong suspect. In writing that story, I became familiar with the research on police bias and the way police officers can become so certain they have the right suspect that they become blind to exculpatory evidence. I especially became aware of problems with poor witness identification techniques and the prevalence of mistaken identity.

I also became aware of how much we can be attracted to a story of injustice and redemption, which is certainly one version of the story of Lizzie Borden, who was hauled off in handcuffs by callous police officers who seemed to have it out for her, then set free by a jury of kindly men willing to believe her. I admit I do feel myself drawn, at least today, to that version of Lizzie’s story, and I feel myself working hard to justify my suspicion that that Bence, Kilroy, and Hart were simply wrong in their identification.

After all, there are few things that more strongly suggest Lizzie’s premeditative intent to kill her father and stepmother than the allegations by those three men that Lizzie tried to buy prussic acid the day before the murders. It was probably the decisive factor in causing the police to believe from literally the first day that it was Lizzie who wielded the hatchet. Throughout the decades of my own fervent interest in the case, the prussic acid story was one of the few things (along with Lizzie’s story of the Note) that kept me in the “probably guilty” column, even when I wanted to believe her innocent. There is simply no denying that if those men were right in their identification of Lizzie, then she was almost certainly guilty of killing Andrew and Abby.

However, since working on The Wronged Man and learning all I know now, I have almost convinced myself that there are sizeable odds it was a case of mistaken identity. First, because it seems farfetched that Lizzie was so desperate to kill her parents with poison that she only pretended to be ill that day, then secretly changed her dress, then sneaked out of her house to walk downstreet, risking being seen by neighbors or friends, to make yet another attempt at buying a poison she had supposedly tried to buy before (and thus knew she would likely be unable to obtain), then sneaked back into her house to change clothes again before appearing downstairs for the noon meal, and then went out again later that evening to chatter away about poison to Alice Russell.

Of course, murderers make idiotic choices all the time, that’s how many of them get caught. But I also know that mistaken identity is more likely in a highly charged witch-hunt atmosphere like the one that consumed Fall River in the hours and days after the murders of Andrew and Abby. As the Daily Herald proclaimed: “Nothing that has ever occurred in Fall River or vicinity has created such intense excitement.” The intensity of such excitement can lead to all sorts of errors, even by the most well-meaning of people.    

But while I am almost convinced Lizzie didn’t walk down to D.R. Smith’s that day, I am not entirely convinced. The fact that no one came forward to admit to being the woman mistaken for Lizzie makes it more challenging to believe that Lizzie did not show up in that store. Yet, overall, I am less swayed today by the prussic acid “evidence” than I was before, which is why I most often find myself believing Lizzie really was home sick in her room that morning, miserably lying on her lounge, waiting for the effects of food poisoning or perhaps a stomach virus to pass. I only wish that Bence’s testimony had not been excluded at trial, so we could know how Robinson would have refuted it. I suppose having it barred entirely was the most effective refutation of all, at least for the short-term purpose of winning an acquittal; but, for the purpose of history’s verdict, he did Lizzie no favors. The allegation against Lizzie still stands, unchallenged. And if she was actually innocent of the murders? Then how tragic for Lizzie that she has never escaped the weight of condemnation brought on by a case of mistaken identity.