Lore - Episode 199: Cutting Ties

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

One of the most brutal and notorious unsolved murders in American history is also the seed that grew into its own fair share of folklore. How that affected the lives of those who survived is half the story. Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ©2022 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved. Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

There was a time when they might have been considered a happy family. Although truthfully, it's easy to look back now and wonder if that was ever possible. The final chapters certainly call a lot of things into question. Andrew came from a prominent wealthy family, but forged his own path early on. He started out working with his hands, making furniture for homes and even coffins for graves, but it wasn't until he got into real estate that his fortunes really changed. Family life was just as busy, too. He and his wife, Sarah, had their first child, a daughter, in 1851, followed by another girl

nine years later. But all of that changed just three years after that, when Sarah died at the young age of just 39, leaving Andrew without a partner and, if we're honest about the social norms of the time, without someone to raise the kids and manage the household. Which is probably why he remarried two years later. From everything I've read, they seem like a happy couple, though. But kids process things differently, and those two girls missed their mother, so much so that their new mom didn't really have a chance.

This was a household filled with tension, frustration, and a whole lot of unexpressed bitterness. It was the sort of emotional time bomb that we've learned about over the years from the movies. It wasn't really a question of if things would reach a boiling point. It was more a matter of when. When that boiling point arrived, though, it would unfold in a way that no one could have expected.

Their lives would be shattered, a community would be horrified, and a nation would never forget. And at the center of it all was one young woman, a woman named Lizzie Borden. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Before we start, I want to acknowledge a couple of things. First, there's a good chance you've already heard the story of Lizzie Borden, and that's okay. I simply hope the path we take today through the wreckage of her life brings a bit of clarity

to what you already know. And second, this is a massive historical event, with more detail than I have space for here. So what you'll get today is the core narrative at the heart of a well-documented story that has filled entire books. But as usual, we need to start with a bit of context. Like I said before, things in their house were a bit tense. Andrew's immediate family wasn't the only Borden household in town, though. In fact, there were a number of them in the Massachusetts city of Fall River.

And here's the key detail. All the other Bordens were better connected and more wealthy than Andrew. The rest of them lived up on the hill, higher up both literally and figuratively than the rest of the community. But Andrew Borden and his family, however rich and privileged they might have been, lived in a more modest house closer to the center of town on 2nd Street, which was why they spent years trying to improve and expand it, slowly turning a two-family building into a large single-family home.

Now, something that's important to remember about this house is just how much of a maze it was. Thanks to its original design as a two-family house, it became a rabbit's nest of rooms and doorways once the dividing walls came down. Most significantly, the house didn't have that typical layout where a hallway ran down the middle with rooms opening up off of it. Instead, many of the bedrooms upstairs opened into each other. You might step into Lizzie's bedroom, for example, and see multiple doors and not know

which one led to her sister Emma's room or her parents' room. Because of this, many of them placed furniture in front of the unused doorways or locked unneeded doors. That's the house. Now, a moment to discuss the people living there. Of course, there was Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby. One bit of evidence that the daughter's disliked Abby was in the fact that they almost never called her mother, despite knowing her since childhood.

The sisters also demanded the same amount of allowance as their stepmother, and typically took charge in household matters. Honestly, for a Victorian household setting, it was just odd, and I would assume also a bit tense. Lastly, rounding out the household were two others. John Morse was the brother of Andrew's first wife, and while he didn't live there all the time, it seems he came and went as he pleased. And the family also employed a domestic servant named Bridget Sullivan.

Oh, and to further prove how stubborn and privileged Emma and Lizzie Borden actually were, they never called Bridget by her real name. They referred to her as Maggie, which was the name of the previous servant. Apparently, they refused to learn a new name and just kept calling the new woman by the old woman's name. Now, through the late 1880s into the early 1890s, Lizzie was a bit of a handful. When Andrew helped his wife buy out part of her own stepsister's house to help her financially, Lizzie and Emma threw a fit until Andrew transferred the same amount of cash into accounts under

their own names. Next, Lizzie took a trip to Europe with friends and then almost refused to come back home. When she did, her father gifted her with a seal-skin cape, and while I'm most certainly reading into things here, it does feel like Andrew was bribing his daughter to maintain the peace. It was, at the very least, a language that we know she spoke well. In June of 1891, the family reported a robbery, which included only a small list of items taken, cash and gold from Andrew and jewelry from Lizzie.

When looking back on it all from today, I have to say that a lot of it seems odd. First, this robbery supposedly happened at midday when everyone was up and about throughout the house, and even though Lizzie pointed out a broken lock on the cellar door, that only suggested the impossible, that someone loudly broke the lock, entered the cellar, and then made their way all the way upstairs without getting caught, and without getting lost in that unusual maze of rooms I described earlier. And then, on August 2nd of 1892, everyone started to get sick. Apparently, that was the day they had left over swordfish for lunch.

By evening, everyone was nauseous and down for the count, except Lizzie, oddly, who seemed to fare better than the others. Abby was so sick that a doctor was called to the house the next day, and one of the causes he suggested was intentional poisoning. But then again, food poisoning during the hot New England summers was so common that it had its own term, the summer complaint, so they dismissed it and moved on. That night, August 3rd, Lizzie left the house to visit a friend, and during their conversation, she let slip that she believed their family was in danger.

Men she refused to name were apparently threatening her father, and Lizzie was afraid of what might happen next. Less than 24 hours later, all of those fears would seem justified. Andrew Borden came home early from work on August 4th. It seems his body wasn't quite finished with the food poisoning, and he wanted to take a nap. That was about 10.30 a.m. if you're taking notes, but the house wasn't running as smoothly as you might expect.

Bridget, the servant that everyone called Maggie, was also pretty rough that morning, she didn't have the privilege of being her own boss, and the Bordens had given her the task of making breakfast, cleaning up from that, and then washing all of the windows in the house, inside and out. So when I tell you that she had to run outside around 9 a.m. and vomit on the lawn, I hope you can understand why. Thankfully, Lizzie allowed her to go take a nap, which is where Bridget was when Mr. Borden came home.

When he finally arrived, he found the front door locked. Quick and tired, he struggled to get it open, the noise of which caught Bridget's attention, and she came downstairs to let him in. Andrew then took a package upstairs briefly, and then came back down to nap on a sofa in the sitting room. Interestingly, Lizzie apparently also heard her father come home, and stepped out of a room on the second floor to laugh at his struggle from the top of the stairs. Lizzie however would later deny being up there, despite Bridget's testimony to the contrary.

Instead, she claimed she was taking care of chores around the house, as well as looking through the barn out back for fishing lures of all things. But it was Lizzie who also discovered the scene of the crime, when she stepped into the sitting room a little after 11 a.m. and what she found was grisly beyond imagining. Andrew had taken his coat off and placed it folded with care beside himself, now though it was covered in blood, as was the sofa too. Ribbons of blood had also been flung onto the wall, even as high as the framed artwork that hung above him.

There was so much blood, but after glancing at his body, one could easily understand why. Andrew Borden's head had been struck violently and repeatedly with a hatchet, carving his face into a ruined mess. 10 blows in total, each one devastating the man's face and head. One of the blows actually sliced one of his eyeballs right down the middle. The result was a body that, even to those who knew him, was unrecognizable. Lizzie claimed that she shouted for Bridget, who was upstairs resting in her third-floor room.

Come down quick, Lizzie had shouted. Father is dead, somebody came in and killed him. But when Bridget arrived, Lizzie wouldn't let her look into the sitting room, instead she sent the woman to fetch two people, their physician, Dr. Seabury Bowen and a friend named Alice Russell, the same woman Lizzie had visited with the night before. When they arrived, along with a neighbor woman named Mrs. Churchill, all of them were shaken by what they saw. Even the physician, a man who had seen a lot in his career, found Andrew's body to be

more than disturbing. But one thing was very clear, the murder had only just happened and someone suggested they searched the house to see if the killer might still be there. There was also the question of where Abby Borden had gone. Emma and John, the brother of Andrew's first wife, weren't home, but no one was clear on where Abby might be. Lizzie insisted that she had received a hand-delivered message from a friend and gone out to visit them, but Bridget had no memory of the woman leaving either.

So Mrs. Churchill joined Bridget in slowly creeping up the stairs. They were looking for a killer, but in the back of their minds they also half expected to find another body. And just as they reached the point on the staircase, where their heads were level with the floor of the upstairs bedrooms, Churchill turned toward one of the guest rooms and saw something on the floor. Another body. It was Abby.

And judging by the evidence, she had been struck by the same person wielding the same weapon. She too had been hit over and over on and around the head, 19 times according to the autopsy. But where Andrew's body had still been bleeding when they found it, Abby's lay in a pool of thick, drying blood. Was there another called Alice Russell from below? Yes, Mrs. Churchill replied, her voice shaking with fear. They killed her too.

The local police got to work immediately. Now one thing to know about Fall River in the 1890s is that while crime was relatively low, the decades leading up to the board and murders saw a massive influx of immigrants from less desirable places like Portugal, Ireland, and horror of horrors, Canada. They took the less desirable jobs and quickly became the go-to boogeymen for any and all fear related topics of conversation. So despite no evidence to suggest it was necessary, the police started to look for clues in the immigrant community.

Surprise surprise, that well came up dry. But they did find another source of suspicious activity and testimony, the victim's youngest daughter Lizzie. And while it might be obvious to some, let's take a moment to unpack why. First there was Lizzie's whereabouts at the time of the murder. The medical experts placed Abby's time of death at around 9am and Andrew's at about 11am, which means that someone brutally murdered Abby and then stayed in the house for two hours, unnoticed by all the others, before doing the same to Andrew.

Or that the killer wasn't really an intruder at all. And when you remember Bridget's testimony that Lizzie had been on the second floor landing when her father returned home at 10.30, laughing as they both struggled with the locked door, it's easy to wonder how in the world could she have been upstairs and not heard the murder of her stepmother take place. There's also the story that Abby wasn't home because she'd been called away to see a friend, a friend who reached out by sending a handwritten note via a messenger. But try as they might, the authorities could not track down who that messenger might have

been, if they existed at all. And the person who declared that story as truth, Lizzie Borden. And then there was the situation involving the dress. It seems that in the aftermath of the murders, family friend Alice Russell stayed at the house with Lizzie and Emma, and she claimed that one day she stepped into the kitchen to find Lizzie burning a blue dress. When asked why she was doing it, Lizzie replied that the dress had paint on it. But it does require us to ask hard questions about how the killer managed to escape without

leaving a bloody trail. Or how, if that killer was Lizzie, she might have managed to look neat and clean when the police arrived. And I know folks have done the math. The best guess at the time between Andrew Borden's time of death and the exact moment Lizzie shouted for Bridget to come downstairs was a small window of maybe 10 to 15 minutes. Could Lizzie have done the deed, gone to her room and changed, and then returned to the sitting room to cry for help?

Some believe the answer is yes. And Bridget Sullivan was clear with the police when she described what Lizzie had been wearing that morning before the murders took place. A blue dress. I'm not saying it's definitive, but I'm also pretty sure the last thing you would want to do in the wake of a brutal murder in your own home is burn some clothing just because it has some paint on it. On August 9, just five days after the murders, the police held an inquest to discuss the

case. Many of the people involved were questioned, including Lizzie and Bridget. And after giving a lot of confusing information, Lizzie drew enough suspicion to be formally arrested on August 11. She would spend the next nine and a half months behind bars, waiting for her trial to begin, which finally took place on June 5 of 1893. And look, these sorts of trials are incredibly complex and intricate, and there's just no way I could adequately capture everything that transpired in just a few minutes here.

But I do think the important things to point out are that all of those inconsistencies I mentioned just a moment ago were brought up during the trial, and just as quickly, they were dismissed away. The confusing stories and testimony about where Lizzie was during the murder, that was blamed on the low dose of morphine that Dr. Bowen had given her, causing, as he claimed, mental confusion. That window of time required to finish the murder and then run upstairs to change was also brought into the discussion, but again dismissed as not possible.

Plus, they never found the hatchet used by the killer, and how could Lizzie have possibly had time to hide it so well? And to make matters worse, a bunch of testimony from Lizzie herself was thrown out because it was given without an attorney present, and she hadn't been properly informed of her Fifth Amendment rights. Add to this the supportive emotional testimony from her older sister Emma, and Lizzie suddenly looked like a victim rather than the killer. Her guilt hadn't been proven without a shadow of a doubt, and that left the jury with a difficult

decision to make. On June 20th of 1893, they left the courtroom to deliberate and returned just 90 minutes later. It was a crime of epic proportions, one that had captured attention on a national level, and everyone was eager for their decision. The verdict that was read aloud would bring relief to some and anger to others, but either way, it was the final word. Lizzie Borden, they declared, was innocent.

The murder of Andrew and Abby Borden has never left us. The blood might have been cleaned up, and furniture and carpets changed over the years, but the stain of that violence and horror will never fade away. Death, after all, is irreversible, no matter how hard we wish it wasn't. It doesn't help that it was such a complex story, played out on a massive stage to national attention. It was a crime before the era of DNA, and one that seemed to defy logical timelines. Everyone wanted to find the killer, but no one seemed to be able to put the entire puzzle

together to do it. There are also many other pieces to the story that I didn't have time to explore here, and all of them have the power to alter our view of Lizzie Borden. There's her visit to a local drug store the day before the murders, where she tried to buy prusik acid, an odorless and quick-acting poison. And there was the fact that Lizzie had a lifelong passion for animals, and how just months before the murder, she had discovered that her father had opened her homemade pigeon coop and killed all the birds.

Killed them, by the way, with a hatchet. The conversation could go on and on, which it has for 130 years, because the truth of the matter is, the killer got away. Whether it was Lizzie herself, someone else close to the family, or truly the act of a strange invader, the unsolved status of this case has never gone away. Either her trial was an enormous travesty of justice, or it was one of the biggest unsolved murders on record. Both options are difficult to process, and each have proven impossible to let go of.

Even the house itself has failed to escape the gravitational pull of those horrific events. Today the building serves a few different purposes. It's a mixture of a bed and breakfast, a museum, and a general tourist destination for people who are passionate about the story. And that means lots and lots of people have passed through those walls over the years. My friend Amy Bruni from the TV show Kindred Spirits set it best on a recent episode of her podcast, Haunted Road. The energy of the Borden House is fed often and fed well by one of the most notorious

true crime cases in American history. Yes, it's just a house, but it's also the epicenter for something larger, something permanent, and quite possibly something supernatural. Countless reports from visitors over the years have detailed various unusual experiences, from visions of mysterious figures to the touches of invisible hands. The Borden House seems to have it all. In the end, though, the biggest ghost is the spirit of uncertainty. Who was the real killer?

What was their true motivation? And how did they manage to slip through the nets of all the people investigating the murders of Andrew and Abby Borden? We might never know the answers to those questions. One thing that might help could be to access Lizzie's own files and documents regarding the case. Apparently, she kept it all, including legal paperwork, correspondence with her defense attorney and anything else that was part of the journey, part of her story.

And where is it? In a locked box in the hands of the same Boston law firm she entrusted them to, her instructions guard them forever and never break the seal on the box. And to this day, her wishes have been honored. But it certainly makes a person wonder, what could be so innocent that it needs hidden from the world? The story of Lizzie Borden is tragic, bloody, and ever so mysterious. How the murders could have taken place, and who the true killer might have been, are questions

that have puzzled historians and researchers for over a century. And after today, I hope you can understand why. But there's more to her story than the murders and her trial, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you one more tale about her tragic life. Take the first steps to your new career with Keanu College, offering small class sizes, competitive tuition fees, and a flexible learning environment to make it easy for you to live, work, and study locally, providing high quality education, skills, and training necessary for your future.

Keanu College is focused on getting you started. Explore our full range of programs, visit keano.ca slash ykeano. In a lot of ways, the death of her parents gave Lizzie the life she always wanted. Yes, there was grief. Yes, there was sadness. And yes, there was tragedy. But it also afforded her the freedom and privilege she had always seemed to be drawn to. Of course, whether or not that actually mattered more than having her parents around, only

Lizzie could tell us, and I'm sure each of us has our own feelings on that. Within a month of her acquittal, Lizzie did what she'd always dreamed of. She moved up to The Hill, that ritzy high class neighborhood that overlooked the rest of Fall River, and she could afford to as well. Her portion of the inheritance from her father's estate netted her the modern equivalent of roughly $10 million. The house she bought was big, with eight bedrooms, six fireplaces, and a whole lot of space, all spread out across three stories of newly built luxury.

Her older sister Emma moved in with her, but I imagine they also brought a lot of baggage with them. How could they not? And sadly, the community didn't let them move on. There would always be rumors that Lizzie was the killer. There was mistrust and social distance, and I would imagine that overwhelming feeling that she wasn't welcome, which had to have been frustrating, right? She had been declared innocent and moved into the nice neighborhood, and yet she would

always be Lizzie Borden. And then there were the children. Neighborhood kids were known to be the most cruel, throwing eggs at her house or gravel at her windows. They would push large needles into the gap between the doorbell button and the metal plate surrounding it, causing it to stick. And of course, there was the rhyme. They would chant it most often in front of her house, to the rhythm of their jump rope.

If you knew about the Lizzie Borden story before today, you've probably already heard the song as well. Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother 40 wax. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41. The details weren't accurate, of course. The number of blows with the weapon are wrong, for example, but you get the idea. And I hope you can see how that little rhyme became like a ghost, haunting Lizzie for decades to come.

Guilty or innocent, she suffered through that small punishment for the rest of her life. In 1905, Emma moved out. Maybe she had had enough of living in the same space as the pariah of the neighborhood, or maybe she just needed time on her own. But when she did, it left Lizzie alone, with her only company the many animals she had surrounded herself with. Over the years that followed, she did her best to live her life on her own terms. She christened her house, Maplecroft, and even had the name etched into the stone steps

leading up to the front porch. But every decision was excruciating and studied intently by the people around her. One newspaper article from 1913 said it best, in a piece about her daily life. Lizzie Borden lives a recluse, as damned by public opinion and as ostracized by former friends and enemies alike, as if that same jury had pronounced the one word guilty. In 1926, she checked into a hospital under a false name to get help for gallbladder issues. The following year, she passed away.

There is some speculation as to how well attended her wake was at Maplecroft, with some accounts mentioning just a few friends and one eyewitness who was hired to sing a song during the service, even claiming the room was empty. Lizzie didn't leave any money for her sister upon her death, giving a good-sized chunk instead to a local animal rescue organization. But that didn't matter. After complications with a broken hip after a fall, Emma passed away just nine days after her younger sister.

Lizzie Borden's graveside burial service at Oak Grove Cemetery was held after the sun went down in the dark with no guests there to remember her. That burial was right beside her father and stepmother, which was either a tender reunion or an awkward mistake. When one of the prosecutors from her trial, a man named Frank Knowlton, heard about where she'd been buried, he asked the question in a letter to a friend that all of us must be thinking. I wonder, he said, if she will ever rest in peace.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Taylor Haggardorn and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place. GrimandMild.com And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.