Interestingly enough, on two attempts I made yesterday to answer this (one
in the morning, one in the evening), both times my system froze halfway
through my answer, causing me to reboot my system and lose everything I'd
already written....
Hmmm...perhaps 'someone' doesn't want certain things discussed about this
case? ;-)
From: "tenebroust" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>I am not a scholar of the case but would love to hear what you have
>to say on it. I believe it is possible that she DID do it, but there
>was SO much going on there that a whole menagerie of people are just as
>likely to be guilty. Please tell me more of what you know of the case.
I don't 'know' anything, other than what I've read from authors who all have
their own pet theories to peddle.
One of the better books is "The Lizzie Borden Sourcebook" by David Kent. It
is solely comprised of reprints of the actual source materials: newspaper
and magazine articles of the day, the inquest and trial transcripts, etc.
One is able to read all the speculation and theories that occured at the
time, which have later been ignored by authors who found such facts and
speculations at odds with their own theories...
One can't deny that Lizzie Borden's own statements were contradictory, and
while I'm prepared to concede that she perhaps did the deed and acted alone,
I've always had the feeling that she perhaps was trying to protect someone
else, and perhaps her guilt was more of being an accessory after-the-fact.
After all, her attorney saved all the data he'd accumulated while defending
her, and stored it away in a locked trunk, saying that he was keeping it in
case the state ever brought the case to prosecution again. Considering that
Lizzie was protected from being retried for the murders by double jeapordy
laws, one can't help but speculate what Attorney Jennings thought his client
may have been charged with if the case ever reached trial again.
BTW, supposedly this trunk still exists, and someone a few years ago tried
to get the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to force the firm that Jennings
worked for (which is still in existance) to release the contents, but the
firm refused and the Commonwealth ruled that it was beyond their
jurisdiction...which has led to speculation that there is something in the
papers which would still be explosive today.
What I have found interesting in all the books written about the tragedy, no
one has done any real digging into the possible motive or motives for the
killings. Victoria Lincoln in her book "A Private Disgrace" (which argues
for Lizzie's guilt as the sole perpetrator of the killings), speculates that
Andrew Borden was either writing a new will disinheriting Lizzie and her
sister Emma, or was going to deed their birth mother's farm in Swansea,
which they loved dearly, over to their stepmother Abby.
But Lincoln doesn't pursue this line of logic any further, which is
disappointing, since when one digs into the record, one finds that everyone
seemed to have a particular interest in this piece of property -- and
unfortunately I haven't found anyone who's done any research into what
exactly became of this property after Andrew Borden's death...
Andrew had twice had a heated argument with a man in the fortnight preceding
the murders regarding renting a piece of property...Andrew refused to let
the property for the use the man wanted to put it to. Afterwards the
authorities presumed the property in question was a shop in one of Andrew's
buildings in downtown Fall River, but I've always wondered if perhaps it was
the Swansea Farm.
Which brings us to John Morse ("Uncle John"); he was the brother of Lizzie
and Emma's mother, and seemingly on good terms with their father. But he's
a decidedly strange character. He had left Massachusetts decades before to
make his fortune out west, eventually settling in Iowa, where he was
variously described as a 'farmer' or a 'rancher'.
It was probably more the latter, because 2 years before the murders he came
back east, bringing with him a herd of horses to sell. It was never
explained why he suddenly came back east, it was implied (not the least by
Morse himself) that he had decided to retire and move back home, suggesting
perhaps that he'd sold his farm/ranch in Iowa. Yet after the trial, he
moved back to his ranch in Iowa, which it turned out he had never gotten rid
of.
Morse's business dealings have always been cloaked in shadow...no one really
seems to know what he was doing back in Massachusetts during those two
years. He 'roomed' with a butcher in the next town, a butcher who was said
to be blind. (????) Periodically he'd drop in on the Bordens, ususally
unannounced, saying he was in town on an errand for the butcher.
A few weeks before the murders, Morse started showing an inordinate amount
of interest in the Swansea farm (as I said, that piece of property keeps
popping up in the saga). He said he wanted to rent it from his
brother-in-law and live there and raise horses; and he would have his niece
living there as housekeeper.
Morse dropped in on the Borden's the day before the murders, and was invited
to stay the night; but first he had an errand he had to do (something to do
with picking up a bull, or selling a bull, for the blind butcher) which
would just happen to bring him into the neighborhood of the Swansea farm, so
Andrew asked him to bring back some eggs from the farm when Morse returned
for supper.
Morse stayed the night with the Bordens, having breakfast with them and
leaving by 8:45. He claimed he went to the postoffice (this guy also had an
inordinate interest in mailing postcards -- everytime Morse's name is
brought up in news accounts, its regarding him being seen going to the
postoffice to mail a postcard or pick one up. Unfortunately, no one at the
time had the foresight to check out just who Morse was so keen on keeping in
touch with.
He claimed to have gone to the postoffice the morning of the murders, but no
one could later vouch for him being there, not even the postal clerks.
Morse then claimed he went to visit a niece -- the very same niece, as it
turned out, as he claimed he wanted as a housekeeper on the Swansea farm.
Morse has been dropped from the list of suspects by every writer of the
Borden murders, because he seemingly had an air-tight alibi -- the niece
verified that he had come to visit that morning, and claimed that he stayed
until 11:30 (the Fall River police logged the call reporting Andrew Borden's
murder at 11:15).
But this niece obviously is not a disinterested bystander, since she had an
interest in this Swansea farm. And when one reads the source material
(comments she made to reporters and printed in various papers of the day),
it really turns out that she's not the air-tight alibi she's been presented
to be.
First off, she lived less than a mile away from the Borden house, in the
opposite direction from the post office...meaning the Borden house lay in
the middle, and Morse would have had to backtrack and pass by, or close to,
the Borden house on the way to his niece's.
Secondly, the niece didn't live alone in the house -- she and her husband
were staying with another relative who was the owner of the house. When
Morse supposedly first arrived there (about 9:50, according to this other
woman's statement), it was the owner of the house who greeted him. The
niece didn't actually see Morse until a good time later.
Both women also made statements to the effect that there were 'so many
people' there that morning, that neither could account for every moment
Morse supposedly was there. No one's ever looked into what was going on
there that morning, why there seemed to be an 'open house' going on (anyone
familiar with Victorian customs would realize that entertaining visitors or
having some sort of function in the morning was unheard of).
The time Morse left the house is questionable, too. He supposedly left at
11:30 to head back to the Bordens for lunch (this too is strange, according
to Victorian custom; usually a morning visitor, especially a relative, would
be expected to stay for lunch; but Andrew Borden HAD asked Morse to come
back for lunch, and seemed to have a particular desire that Morse return for
the afternoon for some reason).
But once again, the commonly accepted 11:30 time doesn't hold up to
scrutiny; when one once again reads the earliest statements these women made
to reporters, one gets a variance of half an hour...and their earlier
statements have Morse leaving around 11, and not 11:30.
Andrew Borden's time of death was estimated to be around 11...
Morse's actions after leaving his niece have become one of the well-known
bits of Bordeniana...he claimed he took a streetcar back to Second Street
(the Bordens lived on Second Street), and conveniently memorized the cap
number of the conductor of the streetcar to 'prove' he had been on it.
There was a crowd of several hundred gawkers already gathered out on the
street in front of the Borden residence, and the place was crawling with
cops. Yet instead of rushing up and asking what had happened, Morse slipped
into the backyard and proceeded to pluck pears from the trees in the yard,
and slowly munch them while watching the house. A cop inside watched Morse
eat 4 pears over the span of about 20 minutes, before Morse finally
approached the house, explained who he was, and asked what had happened.
All in all, Morse did NOT act like someone who was surprised at what had
occured....
Perhaps the explanation lies in another bit of information in the first
version of events the niece and the other relative gave the reporters, which
was later denied by all concerned: namely that the first news of the
murders came to them via a Dr. Bowen (who I shall discuss next), whom they
claimed came to their house (no one was sick, so it was never explained why
the doctor went there, and indeed he later denied having been there) a
little after 11 -- definitely before 11:15 -- and told Morse that Mr. and
Mrs. Borden had just been murdered.
That would definitely explain why Morse did not act surprised when he
returned to the Borden house...
But it raises other difficulties; first, the call didn't get made to the
police until 11:15 -- how would Dr. Bowen have known about the murders at
11:05 or 11:10?
Secondly, Dr. Bowen was the Bordens own doctor, and lived across the street
from them. Indeed, the first thing Lizzie did after telling Bridget, the
maid, that Andrew was dead was to send Bridget across the street to fetch
Dr. Bowen -- who of course was not at home. This was shortly after 11 am,
just about the time Dr. Bowen was arriving at Morse's niece's house and
announcing the Bordens had been killed.
Dr. Bowen is also the physician who loaded Lizzie Borden with morphine 'to
calm her nerves', starting the afternoon of the murders and continuing
through the inquest...any wonder Lizzie at times gave confusing and
contradictory statements?
Dr. Bowen was also seen later that afternoon in the Borden kitchen, burning
some paper with some writing on it. When a policeman asked him what he was
doing, the doctor said it was nothing, just a note from the doctor's
daughter to Emma, Lizzie's sister. The cop later stated that he DID see
Emma's name on a scrap of the paper before it burned, but couldn't say what
the document had been. Was it an innocent note from the doctor's daughter
to Emma? If so, why burn it? Was it the new will Andrew had drawn up,
disinheriting Emma and Lizzie? Was it a document deeding over the Swansea
farm to Andrew's wife? If so, what was Bowen's interest in the matter? Was
it the note Abby had claimed to have gotten that morning supposedly from a
'sick friend' who needed her to visit? A note that was never found, even
though Lizzie and Emma offered a reward, as did a newspaper?
It was the existence of this 'sick friend' note that Lizzie said made her
believe her stepmother was not in the house (and why no one thought to look
for her when Andrew's body was found).
Incredibly, not one cop in the kitchen at the time seemed concerned that
Bowen was destroying possible evidence in the case...
Emma Borden has been suggested as the possible culprit by at least one
author. She was never seriously considered, because she was visiting
friends at the shore, some 15 miles away, at the time. But no one seems to
have checked on her movements that morning, just accepted that she was out
of town at the time and so presumably could not have done the deed
herself...
It's also been postulated by some that Andrew had an illegitimate son, who
for whatever reason decided to kill his father. Why he would also kill Abby
is not credibly explained.
One pretty bizarre event occured in the weeks after the murders; a private
detective by the name of McHenry, hired by the Fall River police to help
them in their investigation, fed a bizarre story to a Boston Globe reporter
who had the incredible name of Henry Trickey (and it afterwards became known
as "The Trickey Affair").
The story McHenry supposedly concocted out of whole cloth was that Lizzie
Borden was pregnant by an unknown suitor; her father had discovered she was
pregnant, and demanded to know who the man was who'd "knocked her up", or
else Lizzie could find another place to live. McHenry provided documents
'proving' this story, complete with the names and addresses of 25 witnesses
who'd either overheard the argument, or claimed to have been passing by the
house at the time of the murders and to have seen Lizzie (wearing a rubber
hood no less) through a window chopping away at her stepmother.
Because McHenry provided documentation, The Boston Globe rushed the story
into print, since they felt McHenry was trustworthy (after all, he was
working for the Fall River police).
The thing is, most of the witnesses were fake, and those who weren't quickly
denied ever having made the statements attributed to them. All the
addresses given for these witnesses were also fake.
Now, the story was obviously a hoax. After all, Lizzie wasn't pregnant.
(Although perhaps we may surmise the good Dr. Bowen was instrumental somehow
in terminating the pregnancy?)
But not one person has ever come up with an answer as to WHY a private
detective hired by the Fall River police to assist them would have fed a
hoax to the largest newspaper in the area...I've always wondered if McHenry
wasn't hoodwinked himself, and perhaps got fed the info from a source HE
considered trustworthy -- such as his employers, the Fall River police.
And this bizarre story has an even more bizarre ending...the same grand jury
that indicted Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and stepmother,
handed down an additional, secret, indictment. It was later revealed that
the indictment was against the Boston Globe reporter, Henry Trickey,
accusing him of tampering with a government witness (he supposedly had
offered money to the Borden's maid, to entice her to leave the country).
Conveniently for Trickey, at the time of the indictment he was out of town,
heading for Canada, ostensibly on assignment. Two days later he was killed
in Hamilton, Ontario by a moving train as he supposedly was trying to board
it...
Or did someone give him a push? Perhaps tricky Trickey knew something that
someone else wanted to keep hushed up?
June
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