The Borden Murders: Trial Of The Century, Testament Of Humanity
The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century is a work of literary nonfiction, and it tells the story of one of the most infamous cases of the 1800s. After Andrew and Abby Borden were killed with a hatchet in 1892, their daughter, Lizzie, was immediately deemed the prime suspect. What followed was a trial held by both the public and the court, a chaotically interwoven series of media releases and court hearings. The book gives readers insight into the often harmful symbiosis of public perception and legal justice.
As I went through The Borden Murders for our literary nonfiction bookclub, I took note of the reoccurring instances where bias and presumptions were used to incriminate Lizzie Borden, and then, further on, a Portuguese worker at the house of a copycat crime.
Here are the notebook entries where I detail my thinking.
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The first page is a general compilation of so-called “evidence” people gathered to prove Lizzie Borden’s guilt; the public’s form of finding evidence was nothing more than delineating gender norms and boundaries. These pieces of evidence span across the entire book, starting from the simple perception of Lizzie’s “apathy”, evolving into the accusation made in court of the crime being done by an “imperfect feminine hand”, and ending with the public’s contradictory opinions of what Lizzie should’ve have done upon witnessing her murdered parents—these opinions were gossiped after the verdict came out and the case ended.
The next page shows more concatenate thinking: the evidence presented on the first page is categorized and used to extend each other. Furthermore, two different branches were added. Firstly is the aforementioned affair with the Portuguese worker, Jose Correiro. This branch discusses the society’s expectations for racial minorities. Second of all is the messy media interpretation of everything that was happening with the case. This is an important topic in the book, and is hugely relevant in our lives. It discusses the public’s disinclination towards intellect and its proclivity towards entertainment.
Here on the third page, I use a complex mind map of sorts to show how one trait of all people gradually led to the validation of unfounded claims. This is also an effect of what we call confirmation bias, the bias in people to link any new knowledge with a preexisting belief. In this case, every new piece of gossip about Lizzie Borden was sent into a spiral as people used it to confirm the persona they had already built for her. Similarly, when people wanted to prove Jose Correiro’s guilt, the bits of evidence they used (stolen money, possible attempt at rape) were all chosen because of how in-sync they were with the persona given to Portuguese people—one of destitution and roguishness.
The final page is a research page that focuses completely on the copycat crime and the incrimination of Jose Correiro; it gathers information from outside the book as to delve into the event more thoroughly. To give you a brief overview of the case, about a year after the Bordens were murdered, Bertha Manchester was found killed in a farmhouse. The way she was murdered was eerily similar to the Borden murders: a hatchet or an axe had delivered an unnecessary number of blows to her skull. Despite the similarities, the public did not seem to connect this crime with the Borden murders, and the media was also unwilling to accept the theory. Investigators tenaciously claimed that the two cases had no connections whatsoever. Consequentially, just as many other cases were solved during that time, the crime was quite randomly assigned to Correiro, an underpaid worker at the farm who had just arrived in the United States.
This event doesn’t just prove again how biased the justice system was—and often still is; the way people discussed it as nothing but a subject, the way they manipulated evidence of Correiro’s case in order to make Lizzie Borden less guilty—these events show an obvious objectification of racial minorities and the dismission of responsibilities forcefully attached to them.
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To conclude, The Borden Murders not only tells us a tale of the trial of the century, it also gives us an understanding of how influential preconceptions are on judgement, how easily we can be skewed by confirmation bias, and just how interconnected equality and justice really are.