The city of Fall River,
Massachusetts has a long history, and was in fact an early outgrowth of the
original Plymouth Colony. The river itself known to the Native American Wampanoag
Tribe as Quequschan (or falling/leaping river,) gave the city its name and
reason-for-being for most of its life. Water power brought grist and lumber
mills and later electric power to feed a developing textile industry that
supported a growing population well into the 20th century. One of
the pioneering families was that of Richard Borden, a name that would be
prominent in the community over the years, along with that of another family
line bearing the Durfee name.
These facts become a matter of
passing interest when in 1865 Andrew Borden a widower, married a spinster named
Abby Durfee Gray and moved her into the family house at 92 Second Street in
Fall River. By 1892, to his two spinster daughters – Lizzie age 32 and Emma 10
years older – this was not seen as a marriage made in heaven, but yet another
move by their “Scrooge-like” father to further reduce the financial legacy which
ought by right to be theirs’.
Andrew, a bank president, renter of
properties and entrepreneur was not well-liked and despite his considerable
wealth refused to light his house with gas or install an indoor toilet. To his
live-in daughters he was a “tight wad” and worse. They felt socially awkward
around their neighbor friends who always appeared better dressed and more
“up-to-date” than they could. To make matters worse, now they had to bow and
scrape to a stepmother they hated (although there is no sign they were mistreated
by the new Mrs. Borden.)
In the early days of August, 1892 a
series of strange events took place in and around the Borden home, including
complaints of strangers wandering the premises and the effects of what the two
daughters reported as attempts at poisonings. Emma in fact left to stay with a
friend, leaving at home the remainder of the family and the maid Bridget who
roomed in the attic.
On the morning of August 4, 1892
Lizzie called for Bridget to run for the doctor, saying that her father lay dead
from wounds to his face in his sitting room where he had gone for a nap. Soon
afterward Abby was also found dead in an upstairs bedroom, her head crushed in
from in back by a heavy sharp object. Thus began a murder mystery which over
the years would take on all the aspects of a tragic piece of American
mythology.
Forensic professionals looking back
on the one hundred-year-old case have praise for those investigators who – even
after the first autopsies performed right on the scene – continued their examination
of the de-fleshed skulls, identifying 10 strikes with a hatchet to Borden’s
head while that of his wife sustained 18 whacks. Investigators found one axe
and two hatchets on the premises, one of the latter with a broken handle and a
thin coating of dust which appeared to have been artfully applied. There was an
abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing to Lizzie as the murderer, but in
the end a jury of 12 men took only ten minutes to vote for acquittal following
instructions from the judge which seem to have encouraged no other option.
Lizzie Borden, a respected Sunday
school teacher enjoyed practically no other social life. Her one great love was
the world of animals and she kept a flight of much-loved pigeons in the
family’s barn loft. Her father disapproved, so on a summer day just prior to
the murders he disposed of them all by cutting their heads off with an axe. On
the day after the events of August 4th, Lizzie’s friend Alice
Russell who was staying with the Borden sisters found her burning a blue dress
in the stove, supposedly because of a paint stain. It was known that Lizzie had
been wearing a blue dress at the time of the murders. I cannot find that these
facts were presented adequately to the jury. Or that it would have made any
difference.
When I was a kid, girls were still
playing jump rope to the (inaccurate) ditty:
Lizzie Borden took an axe, / And gave her mother forty whacks,
When
she saw what she had done, / She gave her father forty-one.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment