“Thought I Heard Her Come In”

In the minutes after Lizzie Borden discovered her father dead on the sofa and raised the alarm, she stood at the screen door at the side of the house, hands to her head, to wait for Bridget to return with Dr. Bowen. When the Borden’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill, looked out her kitchen window, she saw Lizzie’s clear distress and opened her window to ask her what was wrong. Lizzie replied, “Oh Mrs. Churchill, do come over, someone has killed Father!” The concerned neighbor then quickly hurried over to the Borden house and found a stunned Lizzie sitting on the bottom step of the staircase just inside the back door.

A rattled Bridget said she didn’t want to go looking alone, so Mrs. Churchill went with her. The two of them then shakily climbed the front stairs and there found Abby lying face down in the guest room on a pool of congealed blood.

District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, after hearing of the statements made by Mrs. Churchill and Bridget Sullivan to police, asked Lizzie about it during her appearance at the inquest.

Q: [Knowlton] Did you make any search for your mother?

A: [Lizzie] No, sir.

Q: Why not?

A: I thought she was out of the house; I thought she had gone out. I called Maggie to go to Dr. Bowen’s. When they came I said, “I don’t know where Mrs. Borden is.” I thought she had gone out.

Q: Did you tell Maggie you thought your mother had come in?

A: No, sir.

Q: That you thought you heard her come in?

A: No, sir.

Q: Did you say to anybody that you thought she was killed upstairs?

A: No, sir.

Q: To anybody?

A: No, sir.

Q: You made no effort to find your mother at all?

A: No, sir.

A little later, Knowlton would ask her why she didn’t try to find Abby, if only to notify her of her husband’s death. She replied, “When I found him, I rushed right to the foot of the stairs for Maggie. I supposed Mrs. Borden was out. I did not think anything about her at the time. I was so …” He interrupted her with another question.

Q: At any time did you say anything about her to anybody?

A: No, sir ...

Q: Did you say you thought she was upstairs?

A: No sir.

Q: Did you ask them to look upstairs?

A: No sir.

Q: Did you suggest to anybody to search upstairs?

A: No sir ...

Q: I want you to give me all that you did, by way of word or deed, to see whether your mother was dead or not, after you found your father was dead.

A: I did not do anything, except what I said to Mrs. Churchill. “I don’t know where Mrs. Borden is. I think she is out, but I wish you would look.”

Q: You did ask her to look?

A: I said that to Mrs. Churchill.

Q: Where did you intend for her to look?

A: In Mrs. Borden’s room.

To be fair to Lizzie, she did tell Mrs. Churchill very early on that she wished “someone would go look for Mrs. Borden.” Nonetheless, it struck prosecutors as odd that if Lizzie thought she heard Abby come in as she repeatedly said, why didn’t she call out for her after she found Andrew’s body? Why just call for Bridget? As District Attorney William Moody put it in his opening argument at Lizzie’s trial, people were starting to fill the house but “up to that time, by alarm, by screaming, or by any attempt, there had been no effort on the part of the prisoner to communicate with Mrs. Borden.” 

Even more troubling was that Lizzie was denying she ever said that she thought she had heard Abby come in, when three witnesses heard her say it. In their minds, Lizzie Borden was clearly lying to cover her consciousness of guilt.

Through the Lens of Guilt

One of the more persuasive signs that Lizzie killed her stepmother was her repeated claim—and then later denial of that claim—that she thought she heard Abby come into the house. This statement indeed opens a can of worms, presenting questions in which every answer looks bad for Lizzie. If she thought she heard Abby come in, why didn’t she go look for her right away? Or at least call for her? Abby’s bedroom was only one flight up, why not call for her instead of Bridget, who was up another flight? (Knowlton made this point in his closing). And if she truly thought she heard Abby come in, why did she tell Bridget, when she sent her to fetch Alice Russell, “I can’t be alone in this house!”

Even more perplexing, if Lizzie thought she heard Abby come in, when did she hear this? Before Andrew came home? That couldn’t be, or else she wouldn’t have told her father when he returned that Abby had received a note and gone out. Did she think she heard her come in just before she went out to the barn? If so, we are back to the question of why she didn’t call for her when she found Andrew dead. Did she think she heard her come in after discovering Andrew’s body? That couldn’t be, there wasn’t enough time for her to hear anyone entering in the two minutes between finding the body and before speaking to Mrs. Churchill. Furthermore, one would imagine if she had heard someone in the house right after finding her father butchered, she would have assumed the murderer was still in the house and gone fleeing into the street.

The only reasonable conclusion was that Lizzie heard nothing at all; and, as she did about so many other things (like the Note), she simply made-up hearing Abby come in as a ploy to get people to go looking for Abby and discover her body. Although if she did kill Abby, why she may have been in a hurry to have her body discovered is unclear, it would only have benefitted her if Abby’s body had been discovered later, when the difference between a freshly killed body and one killed 90 minutes earlier wouldn’t have been so obvious. Perhaps she simply couldn’t stand the suspense and wanted to get it over with. But whatever her reason, it is clear she was trying to stay in control of unfolding events and nudge the people around her into finding Abby.

Lizzie’s later denials that she said she thought she heard Abby come in made it obvious that she had realized how damning it had been to say that. And so she lied about it, tried to distance herself from it, but sadly, only succeeded in further betraying her guilt for the crimes.

Through the Lens of Innocence

Jennings, in his closing at the preliminary hearing, had no patience for those who found fault with Lizzie for immediately saying she feared something might have happened to Abby as well and wanted people to go look for her. “She had thought she heard her mother come in. Was it unnatural that, being unable to find Mrs. Borden, she should think that she had been killed, too?”

As for when Lizzie thought she heard Abby come in, Robinson addressed this in his closing at the trial. Lizzie, he said, “recalled that she might have heard her come in before her father came back, before Mr. Borden did, and she said at once, ‘Go up and see if Mrs. Borden isn’t in her room. Mrs. Borden isn’t here. I heard a noise as though she had come in, and she must be upstairs in the front room somewhere. Go and see’.” Of course, none of the women with Lizzie heard her say these things; it would appear this is what Lizzie herself had told him, and he wanted the jury to have her story. She thought she heard Abby come in before Andrew returned from his trip downstreet.

“Now,” Robinson continued, “the inference that Mrs. Borden had come in was the most natural thing in the world. Hearing some noise in the house, perhaps the shutting of a door—by and by we will say something about who might have shut it—perhaps the movement of somebody else in that house that she heard—she had no occasion to go to look and see, she was not called to, and her father came in, and as Mrs. Borden had not appeared in the sitting room, you understand.” 

Apparently, the jury was meant to understand that Lizzie had thought her stepmother had come back earlier and had probably gone up to her room, but when Abby didn’t come down to greet Andrew as she normally did, Lizzie thought she had been mistaken, and Abby hadn’t come in after all, and so she told her father about the note. It was only later, said Robinson, when she was being asked about Abby, that “she recalled, as she thought she did, the fact that she had heard a noise which indicated to her that Mrs. Borden had come in.” She began saying as much and asked people to look for her.

Back to Robinson’s hint about “who” might have shut a door and been the source of the noise Lizzie thought she heard, he of course meant the intruder who was lurking in the house, the intruder who had already killed Abby. Even as the prosecution was insisting it would have been impossible for an intruder to hide in the house without being detected, it was clear the intruder had been detected. First, he was detected when he was seen by Abby in the guest room, which is why he cut her down. A short while later he was heard by Lizzie as he moved about—only Lizzie didn’t realize what she was hearing. (If true, imagine how chilling it must have been for her to later understand that she had heard the killer inside the house and could have fallen to him if she had gone to investigate the noise instead of assuming Abby had returned.)

As for all the suspicion heaped upon Lizzie for not calling for Abby, or not thinking about Abby after finding her father dead, this is simply not supported by the facts. She immediately spilled her worries about Abby to Mrs. Churchill when she said, “I don’t know but that’s killed, too, for I thought I heard her come in.” She repeatedly said she didn’t know where Abby was, and she wished someone would go look for her, clearly expressing her worry and fear. She finally insisted that someone go look for her. And, according to The Jennings Journals, after Abby’s body was discovered, the man who the police had left standing at the door, Charles Sawyer, would observe that Lizzie seemed “very much surprised that her stepmother was found dead.”

Now all this seems reasonable, and perhaps not even too difficult to believe, but if true, then why didn’t Lizzie just say all that at the inquest? Why lie about it? Why deny that she said she had thought she heard Abby come in when three witnesses heard her say it? Of course, Lizzie’s inquest testimony was full of denials of all manner of things numerous witnesses heard her say and do. She denied being upstairs when her father came home, even though she knew Bridget let her father in, so she would know Lizzie wasn’t downstairs. She denied seeing Bridget washing windows and even denied ironing handkerchiefs after her father came home—even though she was talking to a window-washing Bridget while she was doing it. Over the course of the inquest, Lizzie denied doing and saying all manner of things that multiple people witnessed her doing and saying, things that would have made zero difference to her guilt or innocence. There was no reason to lie about ironing handkerchiefs in front of Bridget, so why do it? Why destroy her own credibility with useless lies?

From what we know today about the impact of traumatic shock on memory, it seems clear that Lizzie’s memory had suffered a severe blow. The intense stress of finding her father murdered undoubtedly released such a flood of stress chemicals that her memory of much of what she did that morning was effectively wiped clean. Other witnesses who testified at the inquest suffered from the same problem, and just about all of them confessed to having difficulty remembering what happened that morning after the bodies were discovered. Several, like Mrs. Churchill and Alice Russell, even went so far as to say they had no idea what they themselves said or did. Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, described it well when he told the district attorney he couldn’t tell him much about what happened after the murders because “there was such an excitement, and I was nerved up.”

Of course, the authorities who were interpreting everything Lizzie said through a suspicious lens would not have been trauma-educated back in 1892, and it is perhaps understandable that they considered her nothing but a terrible liar, desperately trying to cover her guilt. But we know a great deal about the impact of traumatic stress today, and it would be unfair to go on assuming Lizzie  was a bald-faced liar without taking into account our modern understanding of shocking events on the brain, as well as the numerous other mitigating factors that no doubt impacted her ability to accurately recall her own words and actions.

Author’s Take

I don’t know if Lizzie killed her father and stepmother or not; no one knows. And, I do understand why so many people think she is guilty, and why her insistence that she thought she heard her stepmother come in, and her later denial of it, adds to that impression. But we are not obligated to stick to whatever impressions people formed about her guilt in 1892; why look back at all if we aren’t willing to look at it with modern eyes? It doesn’t hurt to take a few minutes to look at the case from the presumption of innocence, as is legally required of a jury, to see if we can understand why, in the midst of her fear and confusion, she might say of Abby, “I thought I heard her come in,” and then later be unable to easily recall saying so. It seems the least we can do, if not for Lizzie, then for Andrew and Abby, who never received the justice they deserved, in part, because police lacked awareness of things we understand so much better today.  

As I sit here all these decades later, poring over transcripts and articles and other writings on the Borden murders in the light of our current body of knowledge, I believe it’s possible that Lizzie did not purposefully lie at the inquest; after all, lying would have gained her nothing, while the perception of her being a liar cost her greatly. I believe it’s possible that traumatic shock made her unable to remember much of the events that transpired after two members of her family were brutally butchered in her house—while she was there and within a hairsbreadth of being butchered herself. And if there was indeed an intruder moving around the house, then it is certainly possible she did think Abby had come in. But I do confess that’s what I want to believe.