Rush to Judgment

Later that day, Harrington and Officer Patrick Doherty walked into D.R. Smith’s drug store and heard Eli Bence’s story of a woman trying to buy prussic acid there the day before, a woman he had been told by a friend was “the daughter of Andrew J. Borden.” They took him to the house to identify Lizzie as the woman, which he did. (The officers clearly did not consider the possibility of mistaken identity, despite hearing from Bridget that as far as she knew Lizzie was home sick at the time Bence said he saw Lizzie downtown.) From that point on, only nine hours after the murder, the men of the Fall River Police Department were certain that it was Lizzie who committed the murders, and their primary focus became building a case against her. Nine hours is a pretty fast rush to judgment.

However, it appears that police opinion had hardened even sooner than that—in fact, much sooner. In an article reporting Lizzie’s arrest, a Boston Post reporter described his conversation that evening with “an officer who stands high at headquarters, who has been active in the direction of the case, and who was early upon the scene of the murder.” He quoted the officer as saying, “I had little doubt about the guilty party from the first. I was on the scene shortly after the murder. I formed an impression after examining the premises and questioning those who were there. That impression was deepened by a second examination and a repeated questioning of the people in the house and those who arrived soon after the alarm was given.” Although the reporter did not name the officer, there is only one officer “high at headquarters” who was early upon the scene and interviewed Lizzie twice the afternoon of the murders, and that was Deputy Marshal John Fleet. Several paragraphs later, the reporter did point to Fleet when he wrote, “From facts gathered tonight, it appears that the theory to which the police have so persistently clung was decided upon before Assistant Marshal Fleet and his officers had been twenty minutes at work in the Borden house … The police have never faltered in their belief.”

Lizzie showed no overt signs of having perpetrated the murders—there was no blood anywhere on her person, no weapon to be found. Plus, police hadn’t yet had the chance to interview neighbors and those who worked in the vicinity to discover if a possible assailant had been seen entering or exiting the house. Yet Lizzie was given the benefit of the doubt for only twenty minutes? This is the very definition of a rush to judgment. And once that narrative set in, it inevitably colored everything police did—or decided not to do—in the investigation that followed. It also colored the actions of the district attorney responsible for prosecuting the case.

The District Attorney Joins the Rush

Hosea Knowlton, the district attorney of Bristol County, arrived in Fall River by train the afternoon of Monday, August 8th, four days after the murders, and only four hours after Police Marshal Rufus Hilliard already had a warrant for Lizzie’s arrest signed by a judge. Knowlton closed himself in conference with the marshal and county medical examiner, Willliam Dolan, until late into the evening. After being presented with the evidence officers had gathered up to that point, Knowlton knew very well they did not have enough to prove her guilt in a court of law. Their only solid piece of evidence—the allegation that Lizzie had walked into a store on the day before the murders to ask for poison to kill moths on a cape—wasn’t nothing, yet it was hardly proof she hacked into the heads of two people with a hatchet.

Yet rather than 1) consider the lack of solid evidence against Lizzie to be a warning flag that police officers may have rushed too quickly to settle on Lizzie as responsible for the murders, or 2) encourage the police marshal to continue looking into other possibilities, Knowlton decided to 3) proceed with an inquest, serve Lizzie a subpoena to appear and compel her to answer his questions while under oath. On one hand, it was a dirty trick, a form of entrapment, a move that so violated her rights as a suspect that it would later get her testimony ruled inadmissible at trial. On the other hand, he may have felt himself generous, giving her a chance to tell her story and clear herself. (During the trial, Knowlton often tried to burnish his image of himself as a fair and courteous man.)

The inquest was ostensibly a fact-finding mission to “discover the author of this tragedy,” as Knowlton said to Lizzie. But here again, rather than 1) use the inquest as an opportunity to plumb for knowledge about Andrew Borden’s financial dealings, business relationships or other possible sources of murderous enmity toward Andrew, the district attorney chose 2) to ask his witnesses questions that were almost entirely designed to give him information he could use to prosecute Lizzie. And when Lizzie herself was on the stand, his belief that the grieving daughter of the victim was the author of the tragedy became obvious. He was so hostile to Lizzie, and so relentless in his badgering that she wilted under the strain. He could not get a clear story from her, and lack of hard evidence or not, he joined the police in their certainty Lizzie Borden was guilty of the killings. Once the inquest was concluded, exactly one week after the first cry of “Murder!” rang up and down Second street, a new warrant was signed and Lizzie Borden was placed under arrest.

Lizzie’s Supporters Are Not Impressed

Before Lizzie was even arrested, the news that Lizzie was suspected by police was no secret to the public, with the suspicion much discussed in every newspaper. (Police officers were apparently very chatty with reporters back in those days.) Those who were closest to Lizzie and believed her to be innocent expressed their dismay to reporters about this rush to judgment.  

John Morse groused about the police a few days after the murders to the Boston Post reporter. “Because they could find nothing outside the house, they think it must be someone here. People won’t wait until the matter is cleared up. They say right off that someone here must have been the murderer.” Likewise, Mrs. Marianna Holmes, a close friend of Lizzie’s who spent time with her at the house in the days after the murders, also complained to the same reporter, who was standing with her in the Borden kitchen while Lizzie slept upstairs, “The police seem to confine themselves to the house … It seems to me that they gave the murderer forty-eight hours the start of them. I see absolutely nothing to connect Lizzie with a crime.”

When the mayor of Fall River, Dr. John Coughlin, was told of Mrs. Holmes’ opinion by the reporter, he grew irritated, insisting that “every clue that comes up is being run down … It is preposterous to say that the police gave the murderer forty-eight hours start of them. What murderer? What man? Have the police powers to divination which enable them to detect a murderer unknown?” No, police officers did not have powers of divination, but they did have the power they apparently failed to use, the power to delve more deeply into Andrew’s life, or even Abby’s life, to develop clues of their own instead of merely chasing after whatever “clue that comes up.”

Coughlin’s plaintive questions—What murderer? What man?—revealed the authorities’ reluctance to, or perhaps frustration with, investigating the case further than Lizzie. If the murderer was someone other than Lizzie, that person was successfully able to leave the house undetected and disappear into the city. Why waste time and effort to find a needle in a haystack, a needle they had no evidence even existed? Well, no evidence, that is, other than two horrifically mutilated bodies. It seemed not to occur to officers that they might have a better chance to find this potential intruder if they didn’t start with trying to discover where he went to but instead looked more assertively for possibilities of where in Andrew’s life he may have come from. It was much easier to focus on the daughter of the victims, a woman who was inconveniently at home when the murders were committed, a woman Coughlin excoriated in the same article as “absolutely frigid” in manner, a woman who could not consistently answer police questions repeated numerous times (as is the case with many people who have suffered traumatic shock). Indeed, Lizzie Borden was a woman trapped in her house by the ring of policemen outside and ripe for arresting at any time, as Coughlin also boasted to the same reporter.

If not for the stakes involved, it would be easier to sympathize with the rush to judgment and the bias against Lizzie that followed in its wake. Confirmation bias is, after all, a very human affliction that impacts all of us. As Dr. Michael Loesli wrote in a 2024 article on the ways bias shows up in policing, “People use mental shortcuts, which allow us to quickly make decisions without gathering all the relevant facts. At times, we rely on a few key pieces of information to produce a rapid response rather than waiting for a slower, more deliberative and effortful process to weigh all possible options. This phenomenon … is helpful when police need to make quick decisions and are not afforded discretionary time.” Yet, he added, it also carries “the risk of making errors when relying on [it] in improper circumstances.”  

It seems clear that police did “rely on a few key pieces of information” in their initial quick assessment of Lizzie’s guilt—Eli Bence’s allegation that Lizzie tried to buy poison the day before the murders being the most compelling. It could also be argued that the public demand for an arrest made officers feel they did not have the luxury “discretionary time” in which to solve the murders. But is that true?

Public Pressure or Something Else?

Many have contended that even if police did rush to judgment against Lizzie, they had little choice with such intense pressure from the citizens of Fall River to identify the killer. As the reporter for the Boston Post observed over the weekend after the murders, “The very nature of the crime, unparalleled as it is, renders a clamoring for a victim of the law quite natural. People who dare not tolerate the suspicions to which the atrocity has given rise, fall all the more ill-at-ease because of the astounding fact which confronts them, that two of their most prominent neighbors were butchered in their own home, within a call of a thousand people, and yet the perpetrator has not been apprehended.”

Interestingly, Mayor Coughlin dismissed the idea that the pressure to arrest someone influenced police actions. Why? “These people are practically under arrest now. If they are wanted, they will be within reach of any time.” He may not have realized it, but with his words he made their bias transparent; clearly, the only person they ever planned to arrest was Lizzie (unless, possibly John Morse or Bridget Sullivan). They weren’t considering the possibility it could have been done by someone else (“What murderer? What man?”), they merely needed more time to dig up further evidence against Lizzie, which Coughlin more or less admitted when he added, “There would be no use in arresting anyone with the very shadowy evidence in hand at present.”  

Despite Coughlin’s disavowal, there is no that doubt public pressure for an arrest was building in the days after the murder. But remember Fleet boasted to the press that he formed his “impression” of Lizzie’s guilt less than an hour of arriving at the scene of the crime. Other officers under his command—such as Harrington and Medley—made it clear they felt the same. This was not the result of public pressure. So why, when there was no outward sign that Lizzie committed the murders—no blood, no weapon, no motive known to them—would officers so quickly conclude that this unassuming spinster was the likely killer?

In a 2009 article in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco, wrote about how easily police officers can be mistaken in their assumption that a suspect is guilty.

“There are many cognitive errors that lead police to classify an innocent person mistakenly as a guilty suspect. Perhaps the most prominent stems from poor and erroneous investigation training. American police are taught, falsely, that they can become human lie detectors capable of distinguishing truth from deception at high, if not near perfect, rates of accuracy … The subject who is guarded, uncooperative, and offers broad denials and qualified responses is [often] believed to be deceptive and therefore guilty. However, social scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated across a variety of contexts that people are poor human lie detectors and thus are highly prone to error in their judgment about whether an individual is lying or telling the truth. Most people get it right at rates that are no better than chance (i.e., 50%) or the flip of a coin. Moreover, specific studies of police interrogators have found that they cannot reliably distinguish between truthful and false denials of guilt at levels greater than chance; indeed, they routinely make erroneous judgments.”

While we cannot know if this cognitive error, which Leo calls a misclassification error, applied to police officers investigating the Borden murders, we do know they decided almost immediately that Lizzie was lying to them, particularly about being up in the barn when Andrew was killed. If studies conducted by social scientists are valid, and police interrogators “cannot reliably distinguish between truthful and false denials of guilt at levels greater than chance,” then there is a 50 percent chance they were right, and Lizzie was indeed lying. But there is also a 50 percent chance they were wrong.

Leo then explains that a misclassification error is often followed by what he calls a coercion error. “Once detectives misclassify an innocent person as a guilty suspect, they often subject him to an accusatorial interrogation.” This kind of interrogation is notorious for eliciting dubious results, including false confessions, that only reinforce the original misclassification error. An accusatorial interrogation would also be an apt description of what Lizzie was subjected to when she sat down before Hosea Knowlton at the inquest. Police are more likely to turn to such a tactic, Leo continued, “when there is no other evidence against the suspect, especially in high-profile cases in which there is great pressure on police detectives to solve the crime, and there is no other source of potential evidence to be discovered.” This, too, is a near perfect description of the high-profile Borden murders and what Coughlin called “the very shadowy evidence” they had against Lizzie.  

In the end, there is no doubt that Fall River police rushed to judgment against Lizzie, following a pattern in law enforcement so predictable that it would become well-delineated by police psychology experts decades later. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Lizzie wasn’t guilty. It is very possible Lizzie committed the killings, rush to judgment or not.

However, what their rush to judgment did is compromise the police officers’ ability to prove Lizzie guilty. They treated her as a suspect so quickly that they gave her no choice but to ask for the protection of her lawyer, who naturally advised her not to speak to them. Before that point, both Lizzie and Emma had been most willing to talk to officers and easily agreed to whatever searches they wanted, continually offering to help the investigation in whatever way they could. Thus, within only two days of the murders, the police lost the trust of the victims’ family and therefore lost access to the best source of information available to them—not just about the victims and their lives, but about their suspect as well.

And, if it was actually an intruder who so savagely butchered Andrew and Abby? Then the rush to judgment by police meant the killer never had to fear being caught; police were too busy trying to prove themselves right in their suspicions of Lizzie. Either way, no one was ever convicted of the murders, and Andrew and Abby Borden did not receive the justice they deserved.