Tender Murderers Read online

  On August 4, 1892, Fall River sweltered under a heat wave, with thermometers hovering around the IOO-degree mark. The family had been sick the day before, and Lizzie had expressed fears that they were being poisoned. Abby had even called for the doctor, but tightwad Andrew, not wanting to spend the money, had sent him right back to his office, preferring to self-dose on castor oil. For some reason, nobody suspected the leftover joint of mutton or the warmed-over fish that the family had been consuming for the past week. There was, of course, no refrigerator.

  Breakfast early that morning consisted of johnny cakes, cookies, bread, more week-old mutton, and mutton soup. Apparently Andrew and Abby, although they'd spent the night throwing up, managed to get all this down, with the aid of a visiting uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, horse trader by profession. Later Lizzie came downstairs, drank a cup of coffee, and ate a few cookies.

  The mutton was starting to work its effects on Bridget, the Irish maid, and she felt queasy, but Abby Bor den directed her to wash all the windows that day, heat wave or not. First, however, Bridget went out into the back yard and vomited for fifteen minutes. By the way, even though the maid's name was Bridget, the Borden sisters called her Maggie. That had been the name of their last Irish maid, and, after all, one Irish maid is the same as another, right?

  Andrew went out at 9 A.M. to check on one of his businesses. Uncle John Vinnicum was also away on business, presumably trading horses. Emma was away visiting friends. As for Abby, Lizzie told Bridget that her stepmother had received a note and had gone off to see a sick friend.

  At around 10:40 A.M. Andrew returned home, carrying a small parcel wrapped in paper. It contained a broken lock that the old skinflint had picked off the floor of one of his properties. He had trouble opening the triple-locked front door of their house, and Bridget had to leave off her window washing to open the door for him. As she stood at the entrance, letting him in, she heard a sound that was very unusual in that house. Lizzie Borden stood at the top of the stairs, laughing out loud.

  Bridget didn't know it at the time, but Abby Borden already lay in a pool of blood on the floor of the upstairs guest bedroom.

  Like a solicitous daughter, Lizzie helped her father relax on the dark horsehair sofa, so that he could nap in the heat. She pulled off his shoes and folded his coat under his head for a pillow. She then told Bridget about a sale of dress goods at a local shop—to get her out of the house? Bridget said she'd go later, and climbed the stairs to her little attic room to lie down for a while.

  She was roused shortly after 11A.M. by Lizzie's shout, “Maggie, come down! Father's dead!”

  Bridget ran for the doctor and for Lizzie's friend Miss Alice Russell; Lizzie called her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Adelaide Churchill; a news dealer named John Cunningham, who heard the row from his shop, was the first person to actually think of calling the police. While he was at it, he called the newspapers. By 11:45, when the police arrived at the Borden house, a crowd had already gathered outside. Inside, the doctor examined the gory remains of Andrew Borden, while in another room, Mrs. Churchill and Miss Russell took turns fanning Lizzie, rubbing her hands, and bathing her forehead.

  The doctor asked for a sheet to cover the body. Lizzie answered, “Better get two.”

  And where was Mrs. Borden, anyway? First Lizzie repeated the story of the note and the sick friend. Then she added, come to think of it, she might have heard her stepmother come in and that maybe she was upstairs. Maybe, in fact, she'd been killed too. Would someone go upstairs and look? Bridget and Mrs. Churchill climbed the stairs and–surprise!–found Abby with her head crushed in, the blood already congealed.

  Bodies spoil quickly in hot weather. The funeral was held three days later, and about 4,000 people jammed the steets of Fall River. Abby and Andrew Borden were buried without their heads, which the police had confiscated for evidence. While Emma and Lizzie stood watching their father's coffin being lowered into the grave, the police were at the Borden house, fruitlessly searching Lizzie's closet for a bloodstained dress. The following Thursday, Lizzie was arrested for the murder of her father and stepmother.

  Then came the trial. Can you say media circus? Feminist leader Lucy Stone, the suffragettes, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union all filled reams of paper with petitions to free Lizzie, who for some reason became a feminist cause. Journalists from all over the world fought their way into the courtroom. Lizzie was tried, not by a jury of her peers, because women couldn't serve on juries, but by a jury of her father's peers: twelve bearded old guys.

  And some interesting facts emerged:

  Where had Lizzie been while her father was being butchered? In the hayloft of the barn, said Lizzie, where her massacred pigeons had once lived, looking for a metal sinker for her fishing line, and then eating a pear. But a policeman who'd climbed up to the loft testified that a thick layer of undisturbed dust covered the floor.

  Miss Russell testified that on Sunday, August 7, she saw Lizzie burning a light blue dress at the stove. It was just an old thing, covered with paint, Lizzie had explained.

  So what had she been wearing on the morning of the murders? Lizzie produced a dark blue silk dress. A fancy silk dress to hang around the house in, climb up to a dusty loft in? I don't think so, and neither did most everyone else.

  Lizzie faints in court. From a nineteenth-century newspaper report of the trial.

  A druggist testified that on the day before the murders, Lizzie had tried to buy 10 cents worth of prussic acid from him, to kill insects on her sealskin cape, she said. Well, if she could n't buy poison and if the mutton wouldn't do the job, an ax might have to serve.

  That note about the sick friend, delivered to Abby? It was never found.

  During the trial, Lizzie's lawyer kept referring to his thirty-two-year-old client as “this poor defenseless girl,” even as “this poor orphan girl.” At first Lizzie was cool and collected, and her testimony was pretty snide.

  QUESTION: Why did you leave off calling (Abby Borden) mother?

  LIZZIE: Because I wanted to.

  But she soon commenced weeping and fainting during the trial, like the public expected a woman to act. In the stifling courtroom, in those days without air conditioning, you might faint, too, dressed like Lizzie was: a high-necked, long-sleeved black dress trimmed with velvet, a straw poke bonnet, and black cotton gloves.

  Lizzie was dressed like a lady. For Lizzie Borden was an upstanding lady, and the jury couldn't bring themselves to convict her. They acquitted her on the first ballot and then sat around for an hour more before returning to the courtroom, or it wouldn't have looked right.

  After the trial, Lizzie and Emma, now rich, bought them selves a nice fourteen-room mansion on The Hill, along with a horse and carriage. Lizzie changed her name to Lizbeth. It was all too late. Lizzie had gotten away with murder, and the gentry, although they didn't want one of their own hanged, also didn't care to socialize with her. The sisters lived in seclusion, until Lizzie started hanging out with theater people in Boston, particularly an actress named Nance O'Neill, who came up to the mansion to visit. Lizzie threw big parties for Nance and her theater pals. Shocked by this unseemly bohemian–and perhaps lesbian?–behavior, Emma moved out. The sisters never spoke to each other again.

  Lizzie died in I927 and Emma followed her to the gave nine days later. In her will, Lizzie, the animal lover, the cat killer, left $30,000 to the Fall River Animal Rescue League.

  Scores of books, plays, operas, and a ballet have been written about Lizzie and her hatchet, with enough theories advanced to put Kennedy assassination theorists to shame. The maid did it, Uncle Vinnicum did it, a raving maniac did it. My favorite adaptation of Lizzie's story is Agnes DeMille's beautiful ballet, Fall River Legend. DeMille, deciding that an acquittal isn't very visually interesting onstage, changed the ending and had Lizzie hung.

  That Jingle

  The famous rhyme, already being chanted by children before Lizzie's trial had even started, was sung to th
e tune of the then-popular song, “Tarara Boom De-Ay”:

  Lizzie Borden took an ax

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.

  But why forty-one? Why not twenty-one, or fifty-one? We'll never know, because the person or persons who wrote this immortal jingle are lost in the mists of time.

  The Borden house and the main characters, from Rick Geary's graphic novel The Borden Tragedy

  Five

  Shoots Like a Girl: Women Who Missed

  Lolita Lebron

  “I Came Here to Die”

  On a rainy March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists ascended the steps of the House of Representatives in Washington D.C. They had bought one-way train tickets from New York City because they knew they would not return. Their leader was a stunningly beautiful woman, fashionably attired in a suit and high-heeled patent leather shoes, a chic silk scarftied around her neck. Her name was Lolita Lebron.

  Passing the front-door guard, whose only concern was whether they were carrying cameras, they took seats in the balcony. On the floor, 243 house members were debating a law concerning Mexican farm workers. Lolita stood and walked down the aisle, wrapping herself in the Puerto Rican flag that she had brought with her. The three men Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodriguez followed her. At the front of the balcony, she held up a pistol with both hands, shouted, “Freedom for Puerto Rico! Independencia!” and started shooting. Behind her, Miranda, Cordero, and Rodriguez followed her lead, spraying the chamber with twenty to twenty-five rounds of bullets.

  Bullets ricocheted off the walls and ceiling–some of the bullet holes can still be seen today–and when it was over, five congressmen lay wounded: George Fallon of Maryland, shot in the hip; Clifford Davis of Tennessee and Kenneth Roberts of Alabama, both hit in the leg; Ben Jensen of Iowa, struck in the shoulder; and Alvin Bentley of Michigan, the most badly wounded, shot in the chest, the bullet puncturing his lung, liver, and stomach. All survived.

  Lolita, under arrest

  The four Puerto Ricans were immediately taken into custody—they didn't resist. Actually, they had expected to be shot down by the guards. In her purse Lolita carried a letter, which read in part: “My life I give for the freedom of my country. . . . I take responsibility for everything.” She told reporters, “I am not sorry for what I did. . . . In future centuries, people will understand.”

  Puerto Rico, which had been a Spanish colony (nobody asked the Puerto Ricans whether they wanted to belong to Spain), was ceded to the United States in 1898, after the Spanish-American War (nobody asked the Puerto Ricans whether they wanted to belong to the United States). In 1952 the little island, about half the size of New Jersey, became a commonwealth of the United States. Puerto Rican citizens can be drafted into war by the United States, but they can't vote for a president.

  This was not the first act of violence on the part of Puerto Rican nationalists. In 1950, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate Harry Truman. They managed to wound two guards and kill one before bullets stopped them, killing Torresola and wounding Collazo. But Lolita, Miranda, Cordero, and Rodriguez didn't have death on their minds when they shot up Congress; they simply wanted to draw attention to their cause. As Lolita declared, “I did not come here to kill. I came here to die.”

  Born in Puerto Rico in 1919, Lolita grew up in a small house near the coffee plantation where her father worked as foreman. The Lebron family was better off than most. Many poor Puerto Rican farmers had lost their land to the big plantation owners and had no alternative but to work planting and harvesting Puerto Rico's main crops, sugar and coffee. Lolita grew into a beautiful teenager whose village crowned her Queen of the Flowers of May at the age of seventeen, but she never got beyond eighth grade. By 1939, at the age of twenty, she'd given birth to a baby girl, whose father did not stick around. In 1941, leaving her baby with her parents, Lolita sailed for New York City, the land of opportunity.

  In New York, Lolita found work in a sewing machine factory. She married, gave birth to a son, and divorced. She also became radicalized, joining the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She grew more and more dedicated to Puerto Rico's liberation and became president of an organization called Puerto Rican Women for Liberty. By this point, the FBI was keeping tabs on the Nationalist Party and had a file on Lolita. They went so far as to check up on her at her workplace, but for all their efforts remained clueless about the planned shooting.

  At Lolita's trial, in July 1954, she sat quietly and read her Bible during the proceedings. There was a side of Christian mysticism to Lolita that one doesn't expect to find in revolutionaries. She and her companions were sentenced to seventy-five years in prison for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States, and in prison, Lolita began to get mystic religious visions. That was all the excuse that the authorities needed to get her transferred to St. Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital in 1957. As with Charlotte Corday, Grace Marks, and Winnie Ruth Judd, the men in authority seemed to be more comfortable believing that if a woman was violent, she must be crazy. Lolita spent nine months in St. Elizabeth's before returning to prison.

  This mural of Lolita adorns a wall on East 109th Street in New York's Harlem

  Lolita Lebron and her companions were pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979. By that time, she had become a national heroine in her country. When, in 1977, she was briefly allowed out of prison to attend her daughter's funeral in Puerto Rico, people lined the streets, waiting to catch a glimpse of their idol, chanting, “Lolita, Lolita, Lolita!”

  Old Revolutionaries Don't Fade Away

  Release from prison in 1979 didn't put an end to Lolita the radical. She continues to work for Puerto Rican independence and still doesn't hesitate to break the law for what she considers a sacred cause. On May 4, 2000, 102 years after the United States annexed Puerto Rico, the eighty-year-old revolutionary heroine was arrested, along with other protesters, at a nonviolent demonstration on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. The tiny island, four kilometers long and three kilometers wide, occupied by the American military since 1940, is used for bombing practice and simulated war games. The demonstrations had started in 1999, after security guard Davis Sanes was killed and four others were wounded when two 500-pound bombs missed their target and instead hit the observation tower where Sanes was employed.

  Lolita, today

  While awaiting the U.S. marshals and FBI agents who were coming to arrest her and the other protesters, Lolita commented, “I just hope the Americans don't keep an old lady like me waiting too long in this heat.”

  Valerie Solanas

  “I Am a Flower Child”

  For those who'd like to know how not to become a killer, research has shown this much: Don't get abused as a child, and don't quit school or leave home at sixteen to marry or have a baby. Actually, Valerie Jean Solanas did the statistics one better: she left home at fifteen and got herself pregnant by a sailor. It's not known whether she had the baby or not, but certainly by 1966, when she wound up in Greenwich Village, she was alone. True to form, she had been sexually molested by her father, who deserted the family in the 1940s, and was whipped by her grandfather when she refused to stay in Catholic school.

  Miraculously, Valerie managed to graduate high school, go on to do well at the University of Maryland, and even pursue a year of graduate studies at the University of Minnesota. During all this time, she supported herself by prostitution. By the time she got to Greenwich Village, Valerie had become a lesbian, but prostitution continued to keep her alive, along with panhandling and selling mimeographed copies of her newly written SCUM Manifesto on the streets. The SCUM (it stands for Society for Cutting Up Men, and the only member of the Society was Valerie) Manifesto is an angry and funny declaration of extremely radical second-wave feminism. Feminist writers have called it everything from “a sacred text” (Roxanne Dunbar) to “the fulmination
of a sadly disturbed woman” (Susan Brownmiller). Valerie's first paragraph sums the rest of the book up nicely:

  Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

  Haven't you felt like that every now and then?

  Andy Warhol was a pop-art superstar and a starmaker. He invented the word superstar. In his “Factory,” a grimy, silver-walled office in downtown Manhattan, he mass-produced pop art silkscreens of other superstars: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and others. Actually, he didn't even do the original art: the images were taken from photographs, and the work of silkscreening was done by assistants. It didn't matter, as long as he signed them.

  He also made dreadful, amateurish films that the art critics adored, in which he starred various hangers-on, all of who were underpaid but grateful to bask in Andy's limelight. Valerie, gaunt and ragged, was a nobody who lived hand-to-mouth and was often homeless. She wanted desperately to be somebody. She saw Andy, his Factory, and his “beautiful people” as her ticket to stardom, and started hanging out there when Andy would let her. He was often bitchy to her, and his wretched crew of transvestites, druggies, losers, and fag-hags were worse. The beautiful Viva (really Susan Hoffman, of Syracuse, New York), one of Andy's superstar brigade, once screamed at Valerie in a crowded restaurant, “You dyke! You're disgusting!” Andy himself once described her as a “hot water bottle with tits,” whatever that means.