American Murder Houses Read online

  During this time, neighbors whispered that Delphine treated her slaves cruelly. Although slavery was legal at the time, slave owners were still expected to treat their slaves with some modicum of humanity. Delphine apparently didn’t think such notions applied to her. Within just a few years of moving into the home, Delphine was brought to court, accused of physically abusing one of her slaves. The charges were not criminal in nature; abuse of a slave was considered only a civil matter at the time. That is, one could be fined for the infraction but not put in jail. As a result, her criminal record remained untarnished. We do not know if Delphine was found liable and paid a fine, or if the charges were dismissed. Either way, that was the last anyone heard of her poorly treated slaves until the day of the fire. And the story of the slaves being saved from the burning house was also true. It is at that point where the story shifts from history into myth.

  When the LaLauries left New Orleans, the legend of what happened in their house began to grow. Nowadays, embellished and exaggerated stories of the LaLaurie mansion are easy to find. Instead of slaves being tortured, most stories claim slaves were murdered in the home. According to some accounts, as many as fifty or sixty slaves were murdered at the LaLaurie mansion. Most stories include among the victims a young slave girl who fell or was pushed from the roof by Delphine; others tell of dozens of slaves killed and buried on the property. Notwithstanding the stories, there is no evidence that a slave girl ever died from a fall on the premises. Further, there were no murdered slaves or buried victims on the premises. The story of the fire in 1834 was well publicized, but none of the contemporaneous reports mention anyone dying or being murdered in the house before the fire. Further, when the slaves were found at the house during the fire, none of them were dead. It is true that the seven who were rescued were in rough shape and some of them may have died later from their pre-fire injuries, but no one can unearth any documentation of any charges ever levied against the LaLauries resulting from the discovery of the slaves in the burning house. It appears that most of the stories about the LaLauries sprang from the initial reports of cruelty to the slaves at the house and the one time Delphine was brought to court for mistreating a slave. Without question, the LaLauries tortured their slaves and treated them worse than animals; they certainly valued their furniture more than the slaves’ lives. But no one was murdered in the house. Be that as it may, countless people flock to the mansion today, to see the home where the cruel Mrs. LaLaurie tortured and killed her slaves.

  And how does one disprove the stories of the countless murders and the bodies buried secretly on the premises? It takes little evidence to start a legend. Disproving one is a different problem altogether. More than a hundred years later, researchers would reconstruct the events at the LaLaurie mansion and Delphine’s movements after the fire. Much of the legend of the LaLauries had simply been embellished to add drama to the tale, like a good ghost story. It is true that Delphine fled New Orleans; she went to Mobile, Alabama. From there, she traveled to New York City and then to Paris, where she lived openly for several years. There is no indication that anyone pursued her to Europe or that authorities chased after her.

  Most surprisingly, she then returned to New Orleans. The mansion she had lived in with her husband had long since been repaired and changed hands. Delphine settled in a different neighborhood in New Orleans, and her husband was no longer with her. It appeared that the LaLauries had gotten divorced and the doctor had started a new life in Cuba. Delphine’s name appeared in a city directory in 1850, and a legal action was also filed in her name that year. She was not, however, in the directory in 1852, and her estate was settled in 1856, indicating that she had probably died in the early 1850s. Still, there was no record of her encountering any legal problems in her later life, which might have resulted if she had really been suspected or accused of killing slaves at her mansion before her move to Europe. And, of course, if she had been suspected of murder, she could have been charged when she returned to New Orleans. She never was charged and there was no indication that she ever took any steps to hide from public view.

  The LaLaurie mansion, built in 1832, stands at 1140 Royal Street, three stories tall now, with a wrought-iron balcony on the second floor and distinctive arched windows on all floors. The third story was added to it in 1850, right around the time that Delphine died. The 10,248 square foot home is considered to be in the French Empire style. It has six bedrooms, and two and a half bathrooms, and—as with many “murder” houses—is said by many to be haunted. The tall structure wraps around a courtyard that is now paved with bricks. Stalwart believers in the murdered-slaves theory would suggest there are bodies of murder victims beneath the courtyard.

  The house was used for a variety of purposes over the years after the LaLauries moved out. In fact, the uses to which it was put were quite wide-ranging. It became a public school, a music conservatory, a bar, and then a furniture store. By 1937, the home at 1140 Royal Street was more commonly known as the Warrington House, named for a more recent owner. Even so, postcards depicting the house suggested it was haunted and mention the cruel Delphine. The Historic American Buildings Survey contains a photograph of the house, taken in 1937, captioned 1140 Royal Street, Haunted House (Warrington House).

  In April 2007, it was widely reported that actor Nicolas Cage had purchased the home for $3.45 million, one of many historic homes around the country that Cage had purchased—including another one in New Orleans. Only two years after buying it, Cage placed the LaLaurie mansion back on the market with an asking price of $3.9 million. Although the price was later reduced to $3.55 million, a buyer failed to materialize, and in 2009 a bank foreclosed on the property. It was listed for sale in 2010 with an asking price of $2.9 million, but again there were no buyers. The listing was quietly removed that August.

  The home sits prominently on the corner of Royal Street and Governor Nicholls Street. Just two blocks down Governor Nicholls Street is another mansion from the 1830s owned by famous people. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt bought the home at 521 Governor Nicholls Street for a reported $3.5 million.

  Today, many visitors to New Orleans make a special trip to see the home where Delphine was said to have tortured and killed her slaves in a most barbaric fashion. The true facts of the case matter little to many of the visitors; the story is more interesting the way it is commonly told. The LaLaurie mansion is easy to find and the exterior is visible from the street, but keep in mind that it is privately owned. Whether you choose to believe the stories of hauntings and murders in the LaLaurie mansion is entirely up to you.

  *Victoria Cosner Love and Lorelei Shannon, Mad Madame LaLaurie: New Orleans’s Most Famous Murderess Revealed (2011).

  The Infamous Axe Murders—But Did She Kill Her Parents?

  THE LIZZIE BORDEN HOUSE

  1892

  230 Second Street (formerly 92 Second Street)

  Fall River, Massachusetts 02721

  On a pleasant Thursday morning in Fall River, Massachusetts, August 4, 1892, Abby and Andrew Borden were at home with their adult daughter and their maid. Abby was sixty-four years old, taking a nap in an upstairs room of their home, while Andrew, who would have turned seventy in September, relaxed in a downstairs parlor. Their thirty-two-year-old daughter, Lizzie, had chores of her own to attend to, and the neighborhood was quiet. Around eleven o’clock in the morning, someone quietly entered the room where Abby was napping and struck her in the head with a hatchet, killing her almost instantly. The attacker struck her in the head again and again, nineteen times in all, brutally disfiguring her face. Yet no one else in the house heard a thing. The ferocity of the attack would stun investigators.

  The killer then remained in the house—hidden, since there were others in the house—for more than an hour and struck again. This time, Andrew was bludgeoned in a downstairs sitting room. Using the same hatchet or axe as before, the killer hit Andrew in the face and head eleven times, leaving his body sprawled on the couch, covered in
blood and badly mangled. The two victims were each hacked and beaten far more than was necessary to kill them. Investigators would later conclude that the murderer must have been filled with rage.

  The murders would be discovered when Lizzie walked into the downstairs parlor and found her father’s bloody body. She became hysterical and began screaming for help. The maid rushed downstairs from her third-floor room. Soon, the house was abuzz with neighbors and police. Someone went upstairs to break the news to Abby—everyone had assumed she was upstairs napping—and found her hacked to death in the guest bedroom. Investigators noticed that the blood near Abby had dried and her body was much colder to the touch than Andrew’s had been. They realized that the two murders had occurred an hour or more apart. Adding to the mystery, both had been killed in broad daylight, while Lizzie and the maid were in the house.

  The case of Lizzie Borden—for she would be the one accused of killing her parents—would become one of America’s most well-known crimes. As a result, Lizzie Borden would attain legendary status as an accused murderer, a fact underscored by her name recognition today. The murders were seemingly known by everyone in nineteenth-century America and were even immortalized in a children’s nursery rhyme that many people know today, over a hundred years later:

  Lizzie Borden took an axe

  And gave her mother forty whacks.

  When she saw what she had done

  She gave her father forty-one.

  The numbers in the nursery rhyme are inaccurate and Lizzie was never convicted of the murders, so perhaps it also names the wrong person wielding the axe. Still, the popularity of the ditty shows how widely known the crime was: At the time, the murder was sensationalized by newspapers across the country and gained a national audience. This was unusual at the time since the Bordens were not known outside their town; normally, a criminal trial like this would only make local newspapers. The gruesomeness of the crime, and the allegation that the axe-wielding murderer was a single woman, added fuel to the fire.

  Headlines screamed of the “Shocking Crime” and vividly described how the victims were “hacked to pieces in their own home.” People studying crime history in America are often amazed at how news coverage of murders has changed over the years. The Lizzie Borden case is a great example of how gory the news coverage was in the old days. Regardless of who committed the murders, they happened in a house that still stands today and is being operated as a bed-and-breakfast. Students of murder mysteries can visit the home, examine the crime scenes, and even spend the night.

  Lizzie Andrew Borden was born in 1860, and her mother died when she was two and a half years old. Her father, Andrew Jackson Borden, remarried. Abby Durfee Borden became Lizzie’s stepmother, but Lizzie and Abby did not always get along well. Somewhere during the next quarter century, Lizzie began calling her stepmother “Mrs. Borden,” rather than the more familiar “Mother.” The Bordens were well-to-do; Andrew headed a local bank and in today’s dollars would have been a multimillionaire. At age thirty-two Lizzie still lived at home, which was a simple two-story structure with an attic that had been built in the 1840s. Fall River was by no means a small town, with seventy-five thousand inhabitants. Soon, they would all know about Lizzie Borden.

  A search of the house after the murders turned up the head of a hatchet in the basement of the house but no other evidence of a murder weapon. In fact, the hatchet’s handle was never found and there was no blood on the hatchet, leading some to believe that it was not the murder weapon. No other likely weapon was ever located. There were other oddities about the crime scenes. Surprisingly little blood was found anywhere except on the bodies of the victims. Shouldn’t there have been blood on the furniture, the floor, or the attacker? Could a killer have moved from room to room in the house without leaving some kind of bloody trail? And there were only two other people in the house at the time of the killings: Lizzie and the maid, Bridget Sullivan. And no one suspected the maid. Both claimed to have heard nothing out of the ordinary during the time frame within which the killings occurred.

  Various rumors circulated about who might want to harm the Bordens, but attention soon focused on Lizzie. She had been in the house at the time of the murders and her story seemed inconsistent. Parts of it also seemed implausible. How could she have been in the house during the murders and not have heard anything? Neighbors heard nothing unusual in or around the house, and no one was seen entering or leaving the house. Lizzie also told some contradictory stories that seemed to be fabrications, leading some to believe she was concocting alibis rather than telling the truth about what happened that day.

  A two-day inquest was begun on August 9, five days after the murders, and Lizzie was grilled by the local prosecutor for four hours in front of a magistrate. She was not represented by counsel. She denied any knowledge of who killed her parents but freely admitted her troubled relationship with her stepmother. She knew of no one who might want to harm her family. She had not heard anything unusual in the house when her parents were being hacked to death. She said that when she looked into the room where her father was killed, she saw the blood and ran out to call for help. The prosecutor found it hard to believe when she claimed to not realize that her father was dead the moment she first saw him. He displayed little tact as he cross-examined her:

  Lizzie: “I opened the door and rushed back.”

  Q: “[You] looked in at the door?”

  A: “I opened the door and rushed back.”

  Q: “[You] saw his face?”

  A: “No, I did not see his face because he was all covered with blood.”

  Q: “Did you see his eye-ball hanging out?”

  A: “No, sir.”

  Q: “See the gashes where his face was laid open?”

  A: “No, sir.”

  Finding her story unbelievable, the prosecutor insisted she be arrested for the murders. On August 11, Lizzie was arrested and the press went wild. Soon, newspapers across America were covering their front pages with the story. Many of the accounts were filled with the most gruesome details of the killings and speculation and rumors about motives and possible alternative suspects.

  The legal process called for Lizzie to be arraigned and then face a grand jury, which would also call other witnesses and decide if there was enough evidence to put her on trial. After conducting its own investigation, the grand jury dithered. Not enough members believed there was enough evidence pointing to Lizzie as the killer. The grand jury was called back into session and the prosecution presented one more witness: A friend of Lizzie’s would testify that she saw Lizzie burn a dress a few days after the killings. When asked, Lizzie had reportedly said that she had gotten paint on the dress. That was apparently enough for the grand jury to change its mind and return an indictment. Lizzie would face trial for the axe murder of her father and stepmother.

  In 1893, the Lizzie Borden trial captivated the nation. The proceedings were held before a panel of three judges, and the prosecution pulled out all the stops in presenting its case. Two prosecutors handled the case. Lizzie hired two lawyers, one of whom, George Robinson, had been the governor of Massachusetts just six years earlier. Robinson was a Harvard graduate who had spent more than a dozen years in various political offices. He reportedly charged Lizzie $25,000 for his services, but the money would be well spent.

  The trial provided more than enough drama to remain front-page news across the country. The prosecution brought Andrew and Abby Borden’s skulls to the courtroom, intending to show them to the jury and introduce them into evidence. During the opening statements, one of the attorneys accidentally knocked Andrew’s skull, which had been covered, so that it dramatically appeared uncovered in front of Lizzie. In typical fashion for a lady of her era, she fainted at the sight of it and the trial was delayed for a few moments until the skull was covered and she regained her composure. It later came out in testimony that the doctor who had performed the autopsies on the victims had not sought permission from the Borden daughter
s to remove the heads of the victims and had not even told them about it before the trial began. He had simply cut off their heads, reduced them to skulls, and brought them to court as he would any other trial exhibits.

  More surprises came during trial testimony. A doctor from Harvard Medical School testified that he had examined the stomach contents of the victims—they had been removed at the same time as the heads—and found no evidence of poison. The theory that the family had been poisoned had gained some traction because all of its members—Lizzie, her sister, and the parents—had all been ill in the days before the murders. While the pronouncement that there was no poison in the victims’ stomachs might not have seemed all that remarkable, what the doctor said next was. He was certain that Mrs. Borden had been killed an hour and a half before Mr. Borden had been murdered. Presumably, this meant that the killer had remained in the house for an hour and a half after killing Mrs. Borden, waiting for the opportunity to kill Mr. Borden. If it had been Lizzie, how come no one noticed her acting oddly during that time? Could she really have been so calculating that she could act normally so soon after hacking her stepmother to death? On the other hand, could a stranger have successfully waited in hiding inside the house for ninety minutes between the killings without being detected by Lizzie or the maid? The pieces of the puzzle did not appear to be able to fit no matter how much the prosecution manipulated them.