Lizzie Didn't Do It!. William Psy.D. Masterton
to take a bath, you could start a fire under a large cast iron cauldron in the cellar; a couple of hours later you'd have ten gallons or more of hot water. Alternatively, you could heat smaller quantities of water to boiling on the kitchen stove, which burned wood or coal. (No wonder most people only bathed once a week a hundred years ago.)
There was only one toilet in the house, euphemistically called a "water closet"; it was located in the cellar. There was no water above the ground floor. Each bedroom was equipped with a receptacle called a chamber pot for nocturnal liquid waste. Andrew called his a "slop pail" and emptied it each morning in the back yard. The ladies of the household were more circumspect; they emptied their chamber pots in the water closet.
At the time of the murders, illuminating gas had been available in Fall River for several years; electric lights were just coming in. The Bordens had neither; Andrew was satisfied with kerosene lamps, which he used sparingly. Certainly, for a person of his means, the house was fitted out in a primitive way. Lizzie complained about this to her father, loudly and frequently, but to no avail.
Surprisingly, the Borden house has survived, almost unchanged structurally. The present owner, Martha McGinn, has restored the Victorian motif of a century ago and opened a bed and breakfast (telephone: 508 675 7333); tours are also available. Before staying there overnight, I checked on the number of toilets and the supply of hot water; both are more than adequate. The breakfast does not feature mutton of any kind. Otherwise it's pretty much as John Morse described it on that fateful morning in 1892; "plenty of it."
The Neighborhood
The surroundings of the Borden house are shown in the sketch below. Adelaide Churchill, the forty two year old widow who came over to console Lizzie on the morning of the murders, was her next door neighbor to the north. The two houses were only twenty feet apart but, because of the gate and fence arrangement, Mrs. Churchill had to walk considerably further to get from her front door to the side entrance of the Borden house. Dr. Kelly and his wife lived directly south of the Bordens; their house was somewhat more distant than Mrs. Churchill's.
Dr. Bowen, the family physician (age 52) lived across Second Street with his wife, Phoebe. They shared the house with Phoebe's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Southard Miller, perhaps the closest friends of Andrew and Abby Borden. The Crowe property contained a series of sheds and barns. John Crowe was a stone mason dealing in granite and marble. Several of his employees were working in the yard on the morning of the murders.
A map of Fall River where the action took place is shown below. Dwelling houses or places of business are numbered. Alice Russell lived about 200 yards northeast of the Borden house, on Borden Street. It should have taken her only a few minutes to respond to Bridget's call. Sarah Whitehead, Abby Borden's half-sister who was much younger than Abby, lived at 45 Fourth Street, a short distance southeast of the Borden home. She had two small children, George and Abby.
The A. J. Borden building, the Union Savings Bank of which Andrew Borden was president, and several other major banks were all within easy walking distance of the Borden house. Perhaps that explains why Andrew Borden chose to live in this part of Fall River.
FIGURE 2.10 Fall River in 1892
Beyond the range of this map is the house on Weybosset Street where John Morse visited his niece on the morning of the murders. It was a little more than a mile southeast of the Borden house. Also off the map is the Oak Grove Cemetery, where the Bordens are buried, about a mile northeast of where they lived.
The district known as "the Highlands" or, more commonly "the Hill" consisted of many elegant houses overlooking the Taunton River. It was centered about half-mile north of the Borden house. Included in this area, on Rock Street, is the Central Congregational Church which Lizzie attended.
Chapter 3: THE INQUEST
As pointed out in Chapter 1, the chief of police and the mayor of Fall River, Marshal Rufus Hilliard and Doctor John Coughlin, were convinced by Saturday, August 6, that Lizzie Borden murdered her father and stepmother. On Monday, August 8, they, along with Medical Examiner Dolan and Detective Seaver of the state police, held a conference to review the evidence against Lizzie. They were joined by Hosea Knowlton, District Attorney for Bristol County. Knowlton, shown at the right of the sketch below, was 45 years old. He was a short, stocky, squarefaced man known for his bulldog-like tenacity.
FIGURE 3.1 Jennings (left) and Knowlton (right)
The conference, which started at 5 P.M. and went on past midnight, was inconclusive. Knowlton cautioned against arresting Lizzie at this point. In the first place, there was no physical evidence linking her to the crime. The police search of the premises had failed to produce either a bloody hatchet or bloodstained clothing. Moreover, Lizzie was in effect under house arrest already; she had been told not to leave 92 Second Street.
The conference did agree upon one thing; Bridget Sullivan should be questioned more closely as to what she knew about the crime. She was summoned to the Fall River police station at 10 A.M. on Tuesday, August 9. One thing led to another; what started as an interrogation of Bridget evolved into a formal inquest into the crime. This was presided over by Judge Josiah Blaisdell. The inquest was closed; no member of the press was allowed in the courtroom when Knowlton was examining witnesses.
Over the years, the testimony of all the witnesses except one has been made public. Bridget Sullivan's testimony seems to have disappeared; no one really knows what she had to say. Of the remaining witnesses, all except four (Lizzie Borden, Hiram Harrington, Augusta Tripp and Sarah Whitehead) testified later, either at the preliminary hearing (August to September, 1892) or the trial (June 1893). We'll concentrate here upon the four witnesses who never appeared upon the stand in open court, with particular emphasis, as you might expect, upon Lizzie Borden.
Augusta, Hiram and Sarah
Hiram Harrington, Andrew's brother-in-law (and least favorite relative) was a blacksmith. Sarah Whitehead, Abby's halfsister and closest confidante, was a young married woman (age 28) with two small children. Augusta Tripp was a friend of Lizzie and former schoolmate. All three of them were questioned as to the relationship between Abby and Lizzie. There was general agreement that the two women were not what you would call congenial. Augusta Tripp, who liked Lizzie, put it delicately:
Q. (Knowlton) "What can you tell us about the relations between Lizzie and her mother, so far as you observed it, and heard it from Lizzie?"
A .(Mrs. Tripp) "All I can tell you is that I don't think they were agreeable to each other."
Q. (Knowlton) "What made you think so?"
A. (Mrs. Tripp) "I have seen them together very little . . . They did not sit down, perhaps, and talk with each other as a mother and daughter might. They were very quiet."
Hiram Harrington, who didn't like Lizzie, was more critical:
Q. (Knowlton) "When Lizzie spoke about [Abby] last winter, what did she say?"
A. (Harrington) "I don't know as I could tell any more than to speak kind of sneeringly of Mrs. Borden. She always called her Mrs. Borden or Mrs. B. I don't know as I could remember anything to put together to make any sense."
Q. (Knowlton) "Did she speak in an unfriendly way of her?"
A .(Harrington) "Unfriendly, yes."
Q. (Knowlton) "It was understood that there was trouble in the family?"
A. (Harrington) "Oh, yes; there has been, I guess. For several years, I guess."
Curiously, Sarah Whitehead was non-committal about the relationship between Abby Borden and her stepdaughters: