In the hour after Lizzie Borden found her father’s mutilated body on the sofa and raised the alarm, each person that came to her aid—first Bridget Sullivan, then Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, then Dr. Seabury Bowen—immediately asked her the same question: Where were you when it happened, Miss Lizzie? She told them all the same thing; she had gone out into the backyard and then up to the barn loft. But it was only Alice Russell who asked exactly what she went up there to do. Alice recalled what Lizzie said next:
“She says my screen and window—she gave me to understand that they did not come together right, or something. ‘I was ironing handkerchiefs; and my flat iron was not hot, and I thought I would go and get that while I was waiting … A piece of tin or iron to fix the screen.” Later, Alice would elaborate more on what Lizzie told her. “Lizzie says ‘you know there is everything up there, and I went up there to see if I could get a piece of tin or iron to fix it.’ The screen or window, I don’t know which she was going to fix.”
Lizzie’s friend, Mrs. Marianna Holmes, who spent the afternoon consoling Lizzie in her bedroom, confirmed this at the trial when she described what she heard Lizzie telling other people. “She said she went to the barn; and they asked her what for, and she said for something to fasten the screen. I cannot tell you whether at that time she said, ‘a piece of iron’ or ‘a piece of tin’ or ‘something.’ I heard her say all those things to different people.”
Yet, later on the day of the murders, and again at the inquest the following week, Lizzie didn’t mention a problem with her screen but claimed she had gone in search of iron to make sinkers for the fishing lines she expected to use on an upcoming trip. This story made its way into the newspapers within a day or two of the murders thanks to Hiram Harrington, Lizzie’s uncle by marriage, who went to visit Lizzie that first evening. He afterward gave an extensive interview to a reporter, printed in the Fall River Daily Herald, in which he was quoted as saying, “On leaving the house [Lizzie] says she went directly to the barn to obtain some lead. She informed me that it was her intention to go to Marion on a vacation, and she wanted the lead in the barn loft to make some sinkers.”
There is no record of police asking her about this change in her story, nor did Knowlton ask her about it at the inquest. Either he hadn’t been told about her first references to fixing her screen, or he was simply more focused on getting her to justify story about fishing sinkers. However, reporters seemed interested in trying to get to the bottom of the reported change in story, especially the reporter for The Boston Post, most likely journalist Earnest McGready, who referred to himself only as “The Post’s man.”
The Problem with the Screen
On Monday, August 8th, The Boston Post printed an interview with Marianna Holmes, who as we know from her trial testimony had been privy to talk of the screen on the afternoon of the murders. The reporter apparently conducted the interview on Sunday, the 7th, in the Borden kitchen while Lizzie was upstairs sleeping, and he specifically asked Mrs. Holmes about Lizzie’s visit to the barn. Mrs. Holmes replied:
“Lizzie had been ironing in the kitchen. Her flats became cold and she placed them on the stove. As it would have taken some time to heat them, she decided to go to the barn and get a piece of iron to keep her window shade from rattling. Then after she reached the barn, she thought about some lead to use for sinkers at Marion where she intended going tomorrow and where she would have done some fishing in the company of some of her friends. When she came back she saw her father in the sitting room …”
While this explanation did not go far in satisfying the authorities about her suspiciously changing story, it seemed a reasonable enough explanation for Lizzie’s defenders. In his closing argument at her trial, Governor Robinson made sure to minimize the change in Lizzie’s story, suggesting that Lizzie likely “had both things in mind,” and that it “was perfectly natural” to go off on a search that might serve a dual purpose.
Knowlton, however, disagreed. While he didn’t overtly deny she could have had a dual purpose in mind, he did ask, “Why could we not have had somebody to have told us what was the screen that needed fixing, and to have corroborated that story by finding the piece of iron that was put in that screen?” Of course, he did not add that no police officer had made an effort to ask her about the screen, nor that he himself failed to ask her about it at the inquest. He also seemed to have forgotten that she told him she returned from the barn without finding the iron or lead she was hoping to find. (She did, however, say she “picked up a chip on the floor.” A chip of what, she did not define, but perhaps she intended to wedge that chip into her screen?)
Today, students of the case remain mystified by Lizzie’s early reference to a screen that needed fixing, a reference she never made again, and their questions usually go one of two directions, depending on whether they lean toward guilt or innocence. 1) Did Lizzie really have a rattling screen that needed fixing, or does her changing story tell us she made it up as she went along to support a false alibi? Or, 2) If the police were disinclined to believe her story, why didn’t they make any effort to follow up on it, or to ask her more about it?
We can add these questions to the long list of questions without answers about the Borden case—questions both about Lizzie’s confusing choices as well as confusing choices made by the authorities who investigated her.
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