Suitors

That is probably also why, when artists decide to take on a creative interpretation of the story of the murders, they are likely as not to give never-married Lizzie a frustrated love life. In Agnes De Mille’s ballet, Lizzie falls for a pastor and dances with him. Lizzie is then driven to murder after Abby poisons the pastor’s mind against her. In the 1933 Broadway play, Nine Pine Street, based on the murders, the protagonist is also given a clergyman as romantic interest. I confess that in my first attempt at writing a script about the Borden murders, I also invented a romance for Lizzie that Andrew squelched. Again, we see that a romance thwarted by either Andrew or Abby gives Lizzie a reason to at least be irritated at them.

We do find hints here and there in books about Lizzie suggesting that Andrew was not keen on the idea of his daughters marrying. Florence Brigham, daughter-in-law of Mary Brigham, Lizzie’s friend, as well as curator of the Fall River Historical Society, would often tell reporters that Lizzie was “kept out of circulation by her father.” What that meant, she didn’t make clear. Some believe it merely meant that because Andrew insisted on living in a house in the wrong neighborhood, no suitable bachelor would come knocking.

Another reason authors might reach for a romantic interest for Lizzie is because, despite the reams of speculative news printed about her, she publicly revealed so little about herself. Her “character” in creative portrayals can thus feel, well, a little one-dimensional. We imagine she must have longed for love, and so the artist comes ready to fulfill that longing. Although, most recently, an invented love interest for Lizzie is more likely to be female than male, thanks to her rumored affair with stage actress Nance O’Neil a decade after the murders. Portraying Lizzie in a homosexual relationship is additionally useful in a story that assumes her guilt as it helps the storyteller portray Lizzie as someone willing to break the rules of polite society. (See Lesbian Theory.)

But back to a possible male love interest, is there any evidence that Lizzie, in her life before the murders, was ever linked to a particular suitor?

Names on Lizzie’s Dance Card

While there is no solid evidence that Lizzie ever had a romantic entanglement, several names do come up when speculating on her love life, although they remain entirely in the realm of rumor. Still, it doesn’t seem too far out of the realm of possibility that she may have been sweet on a young gentleman, however briefly. When Edward Radin was researching his 1961 book, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story, he interviewed Justice Benjamin Cook of the Second District Court, who was a descendant of one of the early Fall River families and moved in the same social circles as the Borden girls. He said that Lizzie took piano lessons from his mother, and he remembered her playing the piano at his house. She was ten years older than he, so her friends as a young adult were different than his, but he distinctly recalled seeing her at several social functions. “I never paid any attention to who her escorts were,” said Cook, “but young ladies in those days did not attend unless they were accompanied by a gentleman friend. I don’t know if they were suitors, but she went out with young men before the murders.”

While the names of men who may have caught her eye or stirred Lizzie’s heart while escorting her to such gatherings are lost to history, Radin did find at least one man who remembered spending time with her.

• Charles Henry Putnam — According to Radin, some years before the murders, Charles Putnam was a student at Brown University in Providence and spent many weekends in nearby Fall River as the house guest of a fraternity brother. “His young host was engaged to a local girl, and she was very friendly with Lizzie Borden. As a result, Putnam was frequently paired with Lizzie on those carefree weekends.” Years later Putnam discussed her with his son, who told Radin, “The picture Father gave me of Lizzie Borden is not the one you usually read. He described her as a nice girl, fond of outdoor activities, one who was fun to be with. He said she was a very pleasant companion and he enjoyed her company. I believe they went to church together on Sundays when he was visiting in Fall River. I got the impression from him that Lizzie was a gentle girl, well-liked, highly respectable, and he was certain that it was psychologically impossible for a person of Lizzie’s character to have murdered those elderly people, particularly with an axe. Nothing he read or heard after that ever caused him to change his mind, and he died still firm in his belief in her innocence.”
• Curtis I. Piece — We know of Mr. Piece, an “itinerant preacher,” from Officer William Medley, who wrote about him in a witness statement, having been informed that “Piece was an old lover of Lizzie A. Borden.” Medley looked into it and “found that Mr. Piece first met Lizzie Borden at the house of Mr. Tripp at Westport … While he was on speaking terms with her, there was not anything to indicate that Lizzie cared for him. I was told by Mrs. Tripp that Lizzie could hardly tolerate him … He was not her lover and never was. He never was to her house in his life, and did not know her people … He did write to Lizzie since she was sent to Taunton Jail, and the letter was answered by Mr. Jennings.” Medley then included the wording of the letter Piece had sent Lizzie asking to visit her in the jail.

• Dr. Seabury Bowen —  Lizzie’s married family physician, the doctor she was frantic to have come attend her father after she found Andrew dead, is an odd name to find on a list of possible romantic entanglements for Lizzie. It appears only because Mrs. Jane Grey, the stepmother of Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby, brought it up to Officer Philip Harrington when he interviewed her. In his report, he quotes her as saying, “Dr. Bowen’s character is at least suspicious. Four years ago, while the Borden family were summering over the river on the farm, Lizzie remained at home. One Sunday evening during this time, she and Dr. Bowen came to church together and sat in the Borden seat. I myself saw them this evening. At the time, and since, there was much comment on this act. Some remarked how courageous she was to remain in the house alone; but others replied in a knowing way, perhaps she has very acceptable company.”

Mrs. Grey’s catty comment may have indeed reflected actual gossip about an over-close relationship between Lizzie and Dr. Bowen, a friend of her father and stepmother. Victoria Lincoln, writing in 1967, seems to have been aware of such gossip, calling Dr. Bowen “overhandsome and excessively dressy.” Lincoln suggested that Dr. Bowen’s wife, Phoebe Bowen, knew the gossip about her husband and Lizzie and that it influenced her testimony at court in a Lizzie-friendly way in order to protect her husband from being implicated in the murders. (Not a few modern armchair sleuths have speculated that it could have been Dr. Bowen who spirited away a bloody hatchet in his medical bag.) The fact remains that there is absolutely no evidence, other than a neighborly offer to escort Lizzie to church, that Lizzie and her doctor had an improper relationship.

• Orrin Gardner — A distant cousin of the Bordens who was seven years younger than Lizzie, Orrin Gardner grew up in Swansea where the Bordens spent parts of the summer. The two families visited back and forth with each other and, as an adult, Gardner remained friendly with Lizzie and especially with Emma. Newspapers noted that Gardner visited Emma several times at 92 Second Street while Lizzie was in jail awaiting trial and he himself said he visited the sisters at least once at French Street. Imagine his surprise when he opened the Fall River Globe in December 1896 and learned that he would soon marry Lizzie:

“Friends of Lizzie Andrew Borden, who was once accused of the murder of her father and stepmother and whose trial was one of the most famous the country has known, are congratulating her upon the approach of her marriage. The husband-to-be is one Mr. Gardner, a schoolteacher of the village of Swansea, which lies a few miles across the bay to the west of the city. He has been a friend of Miss Borden since childhood days, which they spent upon adjoining farms. The engagement has been rumored about for weeks, but it lacked confirmation until a few days ago, when it was learned that Miss Borden has given to a well-known dressmaker an order for a trousseau. Mr. Gardner has had erected in South Somerset a fine new house. It is said that the wedding will probably take place about Christmas.”

When visited by a reporter, Orrin Gardner denied the story, calling it a “baseless fabrication of the minds of gossips.” The next day, the Fall River Evening News said it was authorized (presumably by Lizzie) to confirm the rumor wasn’t true. The day after that, Lizzie wrote Mrs. Emma Cummings, the “well-known dressmaker” mentioned in the newspaper: “My dear Friend: I am more sorry than I can tell you that you have had any trouble over the false and silly story that has been about the last week or so. How or when it started I have not the least idea.”

Orrin Gardner never did marry and while he is believed to have drifted away from Lizzie, he stayed close with Emma until her death. After Emma died, it was her good friend Orrin who traveled to New Hampshire to retrieve her body and bring it back to Fall River. Her wake was held at his home, Riverby, in Swansea.

• David Anthony — While this name doesn’t come up in any accounts about Lizzie written during her lifetime, a retired nurse named Ruby Cameron made headlines in 1984 when she asserted to the Ellsworth American, a Maine newspaper, that a well-to-do Fall River resident named David Anthony had been Lizzie’s secret boyfriend and had murdered Abby and Andrew because they refused his offer for Lizzie’s hand. Cameron said she learned this from her mother, a domestic servant connected to the Anthony family in 1892, who had confessed to Ruby that she and Ruby’s father had helped David Anthony clean up after the murders and dispose of the evidence. Cameron claimed that Lizzie herself confirmed the story to her when she spent a week as her nurse taking care of her during her final illness.

While the story received a lot of attention in the weeks after it came out, and still occasionally pops up in forums about the murders, according to an article that analyzed Cameron’s claims for The Hatchet, the details provided by Cameron conflict with just about every known fact in the case. (For example, she said the Bordens’ maid, “Nora Donahue,” helped Anthony escape, but of course, the Bordens’ maid was Bridget Sullivan, who in the immediate aftermath of Andrew’s murder was too busy running for Dr. Bowen and for Alice Russell to help a murderer escape.) Furthermore, there is no evidence that Lizzie even knew David Anthony, who was an actual resident of Fall River ten years her junior. Anthony was, as his niece would later tell a reporter who looked into the story, “a shy, kind, gentle … very religious man” who played the violin and the harmonica. Ruby Cameron’s story, clearly untrue, was yet another in the parade of bizarre conspiracy theories about the murders that came out over the course of the 20th century.

A Lack of Evidence

The above list provides slim pickings to support the notion that Lizzie may have at one time enjoyed the attention of a suitor. According to Parallel Lives, even as a girl in high school, when others in her friend group would talk about boys—at least as recorded by her friend Louisa “Lulie” Stillwell in her diary of the time—never once did Lulie observe that Lizzie shared such confidences. As Denise Noe also observed in “Did Lizzie Have a Love Life?”, her article for The Hatchet, “Like a not inconsiderable portion of the human population, she may have been asexual. Or she may have been a product of the sexual repression of the era and had sexual feelings she rigorously pushed back from her consciousness.” Or, she simply may have decided, like so many other young women in her circle, that she did not aspire to marriage.

For someone in Lizzie’s position, the choice not to marry may have been preferable to the uncertainties of wedded life and motherhood. As an unmarried woman living in her father’s house, Lizzie was able to enjoy independence enough to spend her time and money as she wished; but, if she married, she would lose that independence, and she (and her money) would have legally been turned over to the control of her husband. As she had every reason to expect a large inheritance from her father, it might have made perfect sense to avoid romance, especially if no man truly caught her eye or if, as later rumor would have it, she was more attracted to women.

Whatever the reason, Lizzie Borden remained unmarried at the age of 32, and the fact that she apparently never came close to a single romantic date, let alone a wedding, actually served the suspicion of murder against her quite well.

The Spinster as Suspect

In another fascinating Denise Noe article published in The Hatchet, “Lizzie Borden and the Spinster Mystique,” the author pointed out why we may believe an unmarried woman more likely to kill than a married one. “Partly because of its association with sexual abstinence, the word spinster evokes many opposing qualities: loneliness, envy, eccentricity, and sexual repression on the one hand and selfless service and purity on the other.” It also comes with other “dark associations.”

Spinsters are often depicted as unattractive and sometimes as envious, perhaps because a common reason for remaining single, especially in past eras, was indeed the inability to find a suitable mate. Today, traditional spinsterhood also conjures up images of sexual repression and frustration as well as women aching for romance.

Noe points to the influential 1980 book by Ann Jones, Women Who Kill, in which Jones depicts the life of an upper-class spinster as being one of aimlessness and boredom. She inferred that Lizzie experienced such ennui within her constricted life that it predisposed her to violence. “Neither career woman nor society matron,” wrote Jones, “she had none of the joys of work—or of ostentation … Lizzie Borden’s life was all of a piece; for she was nothing but Andrew Borden’s daughter, a woman whose life was apparently without the possibility of an event.” Here Jones was implying that without the bulwark against tedium provided by husband and children, a restless spinster could find herself contemplating murder just so something interesting would happen.

Noe went on to point out examples of the “evil spinster” in the history of crime, such as unmarried governesses who abuse the children in their charge. We also see it in the history of cinema, in which an unmarried woman’s thwarted longing for a mate and family unhinges her to the point she causes all manner of mayhem. The movie Fatal Attraction, in which the Alex Forrest character, played by Glenn Close, terrorizes a nice “normal” family is a prime example.

“An antique and peculiarly eerie quality is attached to the state of being a spinster,” Noe concluded, “qualities that hover over Lizzie Borden and the mystery forever bound up with her name.” This eerie quality informs many artistic renderings of Lizzie, and there is no question our culture now views her through an aberrant lens, which causes us to see a repressed woman with no other outlet except to explode in a murderous rage.

Some artists also choose to depict how it could have been otherwise, if only Lizzie had been able, or allowed by her father, to find love. Agnes De Mille, for example, ended one of the chapters of her book with the story of a missed opportunity for Lizzie to connect with a potential husband. She shares an anecdote told to her by a source she declined to name about something that supposedly happened the morning of the murders. (Victoria Lincoln, who heard the story as well, believed it was told to DeMille by a “descendant” of the Kellys, who lived next door to the Bordens.)

On that great morning at nine o’clock, a carriage stopped before the Borden door … Mr. Borden was still home. Mrs. Borden was still alive. There were two men driving. One got out and rang the bell. Mr. Borden himself unlocked the door, spoke to the young man, and sent him away. Had he asked him in, he might have saved his own life and his wife’s. He didn’t. As was his custom, he shut the door in the visitor’s face, and the man rejoined his friend in the carriage. This was noted in the newspaper accounts of the time and in Porter’s book … No one ever came forward to identify or explain this odd circumstance. It is supposed no one knew who they were. But it is known, although it has never before been stated in print. It was told to me by someone who heard it directly from the principal.  

The next day—what am I saying!!—that evening the carriage occupants learned what they had nearly interrupted. Since the men had no information of any sort to add to the police knowledge, and since any disclosure would plunge them into endless newspaper notoriety, they kept quiet. One was a citizen of Fall River, the grandfather of Victoria Lincoln (who did not give me this story), the Honorable Leontine Lincoln, Old Stormy, manager and owner of a factory for looms, the president of a bank, head of a family; the other was a young bachelor. The object of the abortive call was the introduction to a likely spinster of good reputation and some expectations. The suggestion to stop was made on the minute and half in jest. But sitting in the carriage on the hot street in front of the silent sunny house, the bachelor turned reluctant and decided he would not on the whole care to ring the bell again. The men talked for a short time, watching the house as they sat, and then, laughing, drove away.