In 1892, American socialite and debutante Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted for killing her father and stepmother with a hatchet. If I had been a criminal profiler in 1892 and had been requested to profile Lizzie Borden, perhaps there would have been a different outcome in the trial – you decide.
The defendant is 32-year-old Lizzie Andrew Borden, born on July 19, 1860, at Fall River, Massachusetts, United States.
Her father’s darling
Lizzie’s father, Andrew Borden, the son of a fish peddler, was a self-made man who worked himself up to become the president of the Union Savings Bank in Fall Rivers, he owned a substantial property portfolio and was the director of three major cloth mills. Despite his wealth, Andrew Borden preferred a modest lifestyle in 92 Second Street, Fall River, much to Lizzie’s chagrin who yearned to live on The Hill, alongside her affluent relatives.
Lizzie had a complicated relationship with her father. She was the youngest of his three daughters, with her sister, Emma being 9 years older, and the middle sister, Alice had passed away as an infant. When Lizzie was three years old, and Emma 12, their mother Sarah Borden nèe Morse, passed away. Children often experience the passing of a parent as abandonment. Clearly the father’s sympathy would have tilted more in favour of the toddler who had just lost her mother, than the older sister.
Taking Sigmund Freud’s theory on the Oedipus psycho-sexual developmental phase into account, when Lizzie entered this phase at the age of 3 – 4 years, she captured her father’s doting attention and she had no mother to compete with. Lizzie was triumphant in her Elektra complex. At the age of six, when children exit this developmental phase, according to Freud, girls should identify with the mother figure. However, Lizzie had no living mother and at this critical stage, her father Andrew, decided to marry Abby Durfee Gray – many said because he needed a housekeeper and a sitter for his daughters. Lizzie suddenly had competition for the affections of her father and she was not easily going to relinquish her hold on her father to another strange woman. There were rumours that Andrew had an incestuous relationship with his daughters, but these were never proved nor refuted. It was a taboo topic to be discussed during the Victorian era, but never impossible.
Carl Jung coined the term Elektra complex – referring to the Greek tragedy by Sophokles, of Elektra, daughter of King Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans in the Trojan War, who conspired with her brother Orestes to kill their mother Clytemnestra, in an act of blood revenge for killing their father Agamemnon. Lizzie Borden also committed matricide by killing her stepmother, Abby – her rival for father’s affections, but also a rival for her father’s riches. Lizzie made no secret about it that she believed that her father had married down and that Abby had married her father for his wealth.
Lizzie was an upstanding young debutante and a member of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which sought to curb the consumption of alcohol, as well as the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour, whose objective was “to promote an earnest Christian life among its members, to increase their mutual acquaintanceship, and to make them more useful in the service of God.” She was also a Sunday school teacher, and all-in-all considered a pious young woman. However, Lizzie was not the model-daughter society was led to believe. In 1891, the year before the murders, an amount of cash and jewelry were stolen from the master bedroom and it was an open secret that Lizzie was suspected of being the thief. Lizzie had also been accused by several local merchants of shoplifting. Although Andrew was frugal, there would have been no need for any of his daughters to shoplift.
Kleptomania is the inability to resist the urge to steal items, usually for reasons other than personal use or financial gain. The underlying objective of any obsessive-compulsive act is that it serves the purpose of distracting the ego from a more sinister wish or desire lurking in the subconscious. It provides a safer outlet and excitement, diverting adrenalin. Hidden in Lizzie’s subconscious was the taboo desire to murder her father and stepmother. Stealing cash and jewelry also fits the modus operandi of a spoiled princess – the Infanta syndrome – to whom money, appearance and status are all important. One should remember that Lizzie was openly dissatisfied that the family did not reside in the affluent neighbourhood, where she felt they belonged. And she regarded her stepmother as a gold-digger. Caught up in her narcissistic princess mode, even as an adult, Lizzie did not have the maturity to recognize Andrew’s existence in life extended beyond his role as a father, but that he also, as a man, had a natural need for a woman, whether she approved of choice or not.
At the time of the murders, Lizzie was 32 years old and considered a spinster. Why was Lizzie not married, as she was clearly a wealthy heiress and an attractive woman? Some speculated she was gay – which was never proved – or could it have been that Lizzie Borden had once been her father’s darling and that she had no desire to leave the comfort of her nuclear home, to run another man’s household or forfeit her claim to her father’s money? Andrew’s wealth at that time would amount to the equivalent of $10 million in today’s terms.
Tension between the Lizzie and her stepmother brewed when Andrew not only gifted real estate to his own family members, but it caused a family rupture in 1887 when he gifted his wife the title deeds of a house, effectively allowing her sister to benefit from it. The Borden sisters, Lizzie and Emma, were outraged and demanded a house too and Andrew sold them the original home they had lived in until their mother died, for $1 and they sold it back to him for $5,000.
Tension leading up to the murders escalated in May 1892, when Andrew killed several of Lizzie’s pet pigeons in the barn with a hatchet – this was the only evidence of a violent act that Andrew committed, witnessed by his daughter, but it opened a portal. In the weeks before the murders, both sisters left on vacation to cool down after a heated family argument.
One week before the murders, Lizzie returned but she stayed in a boarding house for four days before she returned home. The members of the Borden household were all sick, probably due to mutton left on the stove. The evening before the murders, on 3 August 1892, John Morse, Lizzie and Emma’s maternal uncle, visited and was invited to stay for a few days to discuss business matters with Andrew. He slept in the guest room.
The following morning Morse left early on business errands and by 9 am Andrew left for his morning walk. Between 9 am and 10h30 am, his wife Abby went upstairs to make the bed in the guest room. It was here that she was attacked by someone wielding a hatchet. She turned her head away and the hatched caught her above her ear – clearly this attack was aimed at her face. Attacks obliterating the face are usually very personal. When Abby fell face down onto the floor, she was hacked 17 more times at the back of her head, killing her. Over-kill is usually a very personal crime, indicating uncontrollable rage – the suppressed desires of the subconscious finally erupting like a volcano.
When Andrew returned from his walk at 10h30, the maid, Bridget (Maggie) Sullivan let him in. He decided to take a nap on the sofa and Maggie retired to her room on the third floor. If an intruder had somehow entered the home, without being seen, and hacked Abby to death, without being heard, would he wait 90 minutes in the same house for Andrew to return, knowing both Lizzie and Maggie were out and about the home, and that Morse could return at any moment? What would his motive have been to kill both Abby and Andrew Borden?
A sleeping Andrew was also first attacked with the hatched in his face, severing his one eye. He was further hacked in a bloodlust frenzy ten or eleven times, again the over-kill signalling personal hatred.
Then Lizzie called up to Maggie that her father had been murdered and shortly after the family surgeon from across the street arrived and pronounced him dead. More neighbours arrived and discovered the body of Abby. The neighbours trampled all over the crime scene. Lizzie dispatched them to run errands – why would she want to be alone with the bodies of her murdered parents, if an intruder could still be lurking?
The police found no forced entry nor signs of burglary, but they bungled the processing of the crime scene, not conducting a proper search of Lizzie’s room, not collecting her clothes nor seizing the hatchet found in the cellar. Yet by rule of elimination, Lizzie was eventually arrested.
During her trial in 1893, in a courtroom where men reserved all the legal power, she presented herself as a helpless maiden. She appeared in court tightly corseted, dressed in flowing clothes, and holding a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a fan in the other – the typical innocent maiden. Lizzie fainted when the skulls of her parents were displayed in a sensational court room drama. Lizzie’s testimony was controversial and contradicting – quite amateurish – but she attributed this to being under the influence of a morphine sedative after the murders. Yet she was not that sedated to prevent her from burning a dress, which the police had failed to seize. Due to lack of evidence, and so many contradicting testimonies, Lizzie was acquitted by the all-male jury.
Lizzie and Emma finally relocated to The Hill. Since Abby had died first, her estate reverted to Andrew, whose estate was inherited by his two daughters. Lizzie Borden never got married and never divorced. She entertained a Bohemian friendship circle where she was treated like a celebrity, not as a pariah in her own community. Her pious mask had dropped, and the spoiled little princess had pulled it off. At the time of her death, aged 66, Lizzie Borden’s estate was worth over $250,000, almost $6 million today. She owned a house on the corner of French Street and Belmont Street, several office buildings, shares in several utilities, two cars and a large amount of jewelry – she no longer had to steal it.
Symbolic patricide in acrimonious divorce battles.
Negative-father pathology manifesting in the female psyche is labelled by psychologists as puellas, a Jungian term referring to the eternal girl child; infantas, the little spoilt princes; and the Elektra complex, women in love with their father figures – all pointing to a woman refusing to grow up and facing adult responsibilities.
When a father withdraws his love for his daughter and transfers it to a new object of his desire, the daughter – especially if she is still a child – can experience this as a primal abandonment and she needs to fill this void with money – men express their love through materially providing for and spoiling their women. Money becomes a substitute for love for puellas – women refusing to grow up – and as in the case of Lizzie Borden, some will kill for it. Others will engage in long-term acrimonious divorce battles claiming ridiculous settlements far beyond reasonableness – symbolically decapitating the men, as legendary Lizzie’s literally do to their fathers.
The Archetype of a puella-wife tearing her ex-husband apart, limb from limb – committing sparagmos like the mythological Maenads, acolytes of Dionysus -and devouring his energy in drawn out court battles, substituting the loss of his attention and love with her boundless greed for money, which she hopes will fill the void of abandonment initially created by her father, is firmly embedded in history and mythology.
Top image: Lizzie Borden (Public Domain) and Andrew Borden’s body (Public Domain)