The Fall River Tragedy: A History of the Borden Murders

by Edwin H. Porter

Now remember how that occurred. When Dr. Bowen came he wanted a sheet to cover up the body of Mr. Borden and he called upon Bridget and Mrs. Churchill to get one. They went into the sitting room and took the key off the mantel and went up the back stairs (where you went) unlocked the door to Mrs. Borden’s room, got the sheets and came down the back. So Bridget had been up the back stairs to that room, but she had not been up the front stairs. Therefore when they got down stairs with the sheets Bridget and Mrs. Churchill knew that Mrs. Borden was not in her own room, because they had been up there. Therefore they knew that she was not in the back of the house, and Lizzie knew that she was not in the back part of the house, because they went up to get the sheets into Mrs. Borden’s room. See how plain that is when you look at the testimony, and it is brought out plainly in the testimony in the questions that are asked by the commonwealth. So you see that when Lizzie spoke about going upstairs to see if Mrs. Borden was in, Lizzie meant the front stairs, because they all knew, the three of them, that Mrs. Borden was not in her own room, and that if she was anywhere in the house she must be in the front part of the house. So Lizzie knew that Mrs. Borden had had a note and had gone out, and Bridget knew that she had a note and had gone out, as they both believed; that Lizzie had seen her up in the room making the beds and finishing up before 9 o’clock, and she had not seen her since, believing that she had gone out, and she 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 at once and see if Mrs. Borden is not up in her room. Mrs. Borden is not here. I heard a noise as though she came in, and she must be upstairs in the front room somewhere. Go and see.” Now, that is natural. They thought she was in the upper and back part of the house, and there can be no doubt about that, because Miss Russell testifies to the same thing Mrs. Churchill does, Bridget Sullivan does, and then, after they came down, there it was that conversation about going to Mrs. Whitehead’s occurred. “What happened then?” “Oh,” I says, “Lizzie, if I knew where Mrs. Whitehead’s was, I would go and see if Mrs. Borden was there.” These two women acting in perfect good faith about it, relying upon the truth of that note story, which Mrs. Borden had told them. Then Bridget would not go up the front stairs, because in order to go up the front stairs they must necessarily pass through the room where Mr. Borden’s dead body was lying, or else they must pass through the dining room way and go by the corner of

the room. They went that way, and found Mrs. Borden killed. Mrs. Churchill and Miss Russell tell precisely the same thing in substance about going up and finding Mrs. Borden. Now the suggestion on the part of the commonwealth would be, if this evidence was not so clear, that Lizzie knew that she was up there, and if you assume Lizzie had killed her, then, of course, it would be quite plain that she knew where she was, but if you do not presume the defendant guilty to begin with, it shows nothing until she is proved guilty. Then we have no difficulty with the statement of these three women. They define and make it very plain. Mr. Borden, you will remember, came in, as I have said, about 10:45 o’clock. Now 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, and as the two women going upstairs found she was not in the back room upstairs, they would undoubtedly think if she had come in she was in the front part of the house, and then she recalled as she thought she did the fact that she had heard a noise which indicated to her Mrs. Borden had come in. Now, I submit to you, gentlemen, that, taking the testimony as it is here, and there is no other that I know of, it exactly and clearly gives the situation as it was, and just as they acted. Then they said that she showed no feeling when her stepmother was lying dead on the guest-room floor; that she laughed on the stairs.

Well, Bridget said something about opening the door. She said she said, “O, pshaw,” and she said it in such a way that Lizzie laughed, standing somewhere at her room door, a room where she could not see into the guest chamber, and the door of which, so far as we know, was closed. Nobody knows anything about it. What was there then why she shouldn’t laugh? O, they say, she had murdered her step-mother. Oh, hold on. That is not proved yet. You might think that everything was all right in your house, and somebody track a joke on you and you laugh, but if the evidence should turn out that your son had fallen dead on the floor above, that does not warrant the conclusion that you were laughing when his dead body was lying on the floor, because you did not know it. They say she knew it. Well, then, I should agree if she knew it and was laughing and joking about what Bridget said that she should be blamed, and we would

criticize her and condemn her, but they have not any evidence of it. They assume it, and the district attorney opened it, that while the dead body of Mrs. Borden was lying in the guest chamber Lizzie laughed. Well, the inference was that she had murdered her and then laughed. But that is assuming what they have not proved. They say she did not look at her dead father. Well, she had looked at him with horror. She had come in from the outside into the back hallway and come into the kitchen, and the door stood ajar, and she started to go into the sitting room when this horrible sight met her gaze. She had seen her father. Did they ask her to go and wring her heart over the remains that were mutilated beyond recognition? and because she did not rush into the sitting room and stand over against that mutilated body they say she is guilty. Why, Mrs. Churchill and Bridget Sullivan and Miss Russell could not pass through there unless they touched the corner after the body was covered. Let us ask of other innocent people the same thing that you would ask of Lizzie. They say that Miss Lizzie did not show any signs of fear, but that Dr. Bowen and Mrs. Sawyer were afraid. They told you about it. Well, how do they know she did not show any signs of fear? Why do they make any such statement as that? Because she said to Bridget, “You must go get somebody, for I can’t stay in this house alone.” Look at things in a natural and easy way, in a common sense way, assuming her innocence and not assuming her guilt. That is the way you will meet these things and all of the facts. Then they start off on another track, and they say she killed her stepmother and her father because that was a house without any comforts in it. Well, gentlemen, I hope you all live in a better way than the Borden family lived, so far as having good furniture and conveniences. Are your houses all warmed with steam? Do you have carpets on every one of your floors, stairs and all? Do you have pictures and pianos and a library and all conveniences and luxury? Do you? Well, I congratulate you, if you do.

This is not a down-trodden people. There is lots of comfort in our country homes. I know something of them, but I remember back in my boyhood we did not have gas and running water in every room. We were not brought up that way. We did not have such things as you saw in the Borden house. It wasn’t in poverty-stricken, desolate quarters like a shanty, where the folks simply live and breathe and do not eat anything. They paraded here the bill of fare for breakfast. I do not know what they are going to talk about, what sort of breakfast the ordinary country people have in the houses. They do not live as well as we do in hotels, perhaps they live better.

I do not wish to say a word against the hotel, but perhaps a coarser fare is as good as the fixed-up notions that we get on the hotel table, but at any rate it is the way people live in our towns and cities, and no considerable number of people have come to harm.

Andrew Borden was a simple man, an old-fashioned man. He did not dress himself up with jewelry. He carried a silver watch. He was a plain man of the every day sort of fifty years ago. He was living along in that way. His daughters were brought up with him. They had become connected with prominent things in Fall River, for they lived at home. They had the things which you saw upon them. You will know well enough they were not poorly supplied, and were not pinched and were not starved into doing this thing. Do you think it looked as if they were starved into the crime and pinched into wrong? Here was a young woman with property of her own. Starved to death, they say; pinched so that she could not live, wrought up to frenzy and madness, so that she would murder her own father for the want of things, and yet, as has been shown here worth in her own right of money and personal property from $4000 to $5000, owning also real estate in common with her sister there in Fall River. What is the use of talking about that? Did she want any more to live on in comfort? Do they say she wanted to get her father’s property or a half of it? Do they reason that she went and killed the stepmother first so that when the property came by inheritance it would pass to herself and sister. They must say something. They say she killed her stepmother because of trouble. That is one of the arguments about which I will speak by and by, but then there is no trouble with her father, as they see, and then she had a change of purpose, or she had a double purpose, to kill Mrs. Borden because she did not like her, and to kill her father because she liked him, but she wanted his money. What sort of a compound! Two motives are running through that argument inconsistent with each other, each directed independently to a specific end: Carried out as to one in the early part of the murder, and then she not only changed her dress and cleaned herself and became another woman, but found herself inhabited with a distinct motive and then slaughtered her father. Sometimes when a young man goes on a rig and becomes dissolute and a spendthrift he will do almost anything to retrieve what he calls the misfortune which he has brought upon himself, and many an old father has found the gray hairs in his head multiplied because of the waywardness of his boy. Sometimes these great crimes are committed in that way, but if you expect to find in

this case that a young woman like her was slaughtering her father when she herself was moral and upright and christian and charitable and devoted to good things in this world, you will find something that the books have never recorded, and which will be a greater mystery than the murder itself. They tell us about the ill-feelings. Well, gentlemen, I am going to consider that in a very few words, because I say to you that the government has made a lamentable failure on that question. They say that is the motive that so qualifies the different acts that are testified to here that it puts this defendant in close connection with the murder of Mrs. Borden, and then they say that Mrs. Borden being murdered, Lizzie murdered Mr. Borden for his property, or possibly they may say, murdered him to conceal her crime—for that or some other reason, but it does not rest at all on this foundation of family relations. Let us see what there was in it. What have they proved? They have proved that from five or six years ago Lizzie did not call Mrs. Borden mother. Lizzie is now a woman of thirty-one or thirty-three years old, thirty-two when these crimes were committed. Mrs. Borden was her stepmother, and she was not her own mother. It is true that Mrs. Borden came there when Lizzie was a little child of two or three years, and sometimes we see that where a stepmother has come into a large family and has brought up a family the children know no difference and always call her mother just the same. That is true in a very large degree, happily so, too: but sometimes when the children get grown up, and when they are told about their mother that died long ago, somehow or other there springs up in the mind of the children a yearning or a longing to know of the parent that they really had; and how many a man says, in speaking of the family from which he came, “She is not my mother.”

He calls her mother, perhaps. He introduces her as “my mother,” but the first words after you engage him in conversation are, “She is not my mother, she is my stepmother. My mother died long ago. She lies buried twenty-five years, but still she was my mother.” I suspect that man never lets into the inner chambers of his heart the feeling that anybody else in the world can stand where his mother did. You may gloss it over, you may talk about it as much as you will, but happy is the man that remembers his mother, that pure mother that lived to see him grow up, and kind as anybody else may be, there never goes out of his heart the feeling for that dead one that is gone, that stood first and foremost to him, and nursed him in his babyhood. It does not require passion or ill will to hold that