Killer Women With An Axe To Grind: The Legend of Lizzie Borden
R.C. Jara
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This is part one of an article series about axe murderers in horror.
Growing up in the US, stories of grisly murder catch fire without restriction. Dissemination of the world’s horrors, especially those in one’s own backyard, has evolved to an even greater extent through the use of social media. The adult in me finds it unsettling how much time in my youth was spent relating to peers over a shared knowledge of the worst tragedies imaginable. Yet, as warped as it sounds, I’ve come to appreciate how aspects of growing haunted help to preserve a shared history. There are ghosts almost too old to be fearful of, though some legends are nonetheless challenging. In the form of nursery rhymes, many of which utilize memetic aspects of history to pass down as folklore, stories of killers have earned a sacred place in the collective imagination.
One of the most infamous goes like this:
Lizzie Borden had an ax
Gave her father forty whacks
When she saw what she had done
Gave her mother forty-one
In true metafolkric fashion, these lines have been enshrined as fact, despite the Borden case being unsolved. The circumstantial evidence against Lizzie Borden aroused plenty of suspicion in the press and the court of public opinion (arguably one and the same), but was inadequate for a conviction. The narrative of her trial sat at a crossroads of various socio-political issues that saw everyone from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to suffragettes nationwide rally in support of her cause. Ultimately, she was acquitted by a jury of men who could not be convinced that a woman would commit such a heinous crime.
Several films and TV shows have kept the Borden murders alive in the imagination. Most of them run with the common assumption that Lizzie Borden was the perpetrator. Few offer insight into her as a person or the times she lived in without winking at the audience. The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) is a uniquely tense dramatization of the case, finding an ugly motive at the center of a confounding story. Starring Elizabeth Montgomery, who in an eerie coincidence was a distant relative of Borden, the made-for-TV film would be rote if not for a chilling lead performance and revenge-centric plot. In this alternate retelling of history, Lizzie Borden is a victim of abuse at the hands of her father Andrew.
The Legend of Lizzie Borden is a domestic psychodrama that leans into the uncomfortable dynamic between Lizzie and her father which, to this day, remains a source of speculation. It is also the first film to depict Lizzie stripping nude before she kills; partly as a hypothetical for why no blood was discovered on her clothes, but also as a means to complete the circuit of the film’s themes. The film is as much a precursor to the slasher boom of the 1980s as it is a rape-revenge tale.
Although the viewer is operating under the assumption that Lizzie is the killer, hand-held POV shots are used to heighten suspense effectively. The gruesome manner in which Andrew was killed, rooted in the fact that his face was bludgeoned to an unrecognizable degree, is portrayed as a moment of catharsis. As Lizzie approaches her father in the nude and he begins to register the situation, a hazy flashback of their lives plays over an increasingly erratic score. Beforehand, Andrew tells her how strange she is, saying: “one minute [you are] as cold and hard as a gravestone. The next, as loving as any father could wish.”
The irony of these final words reverberates with every swing of Lizzie’s hatchet. It is an arresting sequence that articulates Lizzie’s warped state of mind while emphasizing her composure. Her non-answer when asked about the murders at the end of her trial tells the viewer all they need to know. By then, we’re happily complicit.
Craig Macneil’s Lizzie (2018) takes a similar route as the 1975 film in that it characterizes all the men in her life as predators. This iteration, however, imagines a forbidden romance between Lizzie (Chloë Sevigny) and her maid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart). Making films based on unsubstantiated claims is par for the course regarding this particular subject matter. Macneil’s film succeeds in making a compelling drama surrounding Lizzie and Bridget, and it has everything to do with the central performances.
Sevigny and Stewart play secret lovers in cahoots with one another to murder an overbearing patriarch, continuing a trend of giving the story a sympathetic bent and doubling down on the necessity of the killings for personal freedom. While there are legitimate concerns to be had about obscuring the ethnic and religious issues that, by and large, contain all the actual substance of the Borden story in its historical context, the romance at the center of Lizzie is genuine. Sevigny and Stewart are as electrifying as one might expect. Every interaction is precious to the film’s rhythm and, though it is not genre-driven like many of its predecessors, the film’s heartbreaking conclusion is better served by restraint in the long run.
The world of speculative fiction is tricky, to say the least. There is no alternative vision of the past without its fair share of problematic elements. This does not mean that we, as a culture, cannot enjoy something like Lizzie Borden’s Revenge in all its sleazy, soft-core glory. But, running it back to how meta folklore can turn a cute rhyme into accepted truth, the devil is always in the details. Without being too pedantic, if Lizzie killed her father and stepmother, it was with a hatchet, not an axe. A hatchet, with a loaded hammerhead behind its blade, is a tool hand that amplifies the user’s striking power. It isn’t a matter of whether a “good” Protestant woman could perform a set of heinous murders, but whether she had the drive. An ax, on the contrary, requires two hands to swing properly along with the determination to use it. Political division in Fall River, MA kept the Borden murders in the spotlight, and the conversation relished in the ambiguities of the situation.
The same cannot be said for Candy Montgomery, a Wylie, Texas native who murdered her best friend on the afternoon of Friday, June 13th, 1980. Candy, in fact, did take an axe. And the details surrounding this murder have re-entered the current media lexicon via Hulu’s true-crime miniseries, Candy. Montgomery and Borden occupy a similar place in the public’s imagination, given both cases have been studied as crimes of opportunity. Candy’s story, however, diverts into much darker territory.
In Candy, we follow the tumultuous friendship between Montgomery (Jessica Biel) and Betty Gore (Melanie Lynskey) in the days leading up to Gore’s brutal killing with a three-foot axe. This murder has no rhymes associated with it. However, Candy’s motive follows a line of reasoning that, in the true spirit of American myth-making, makes for good television. Two Texas homemakers trapped in unhappy marriages shouldn’t be an angle made up of pure conjecture given a) the relative recency of the case and b) the perpetual state of heterosexual relationships.
Add to that, the suffocating role that religion plays Candy’s aggressively suburban lifestyle. Much of what Candy tries to do is tell a story about how the expectations of a Christian housewife are so ridiculous, they cannot even convince themselves to have fun in their extra-marital affairs. Catching feelings, we’re told, is where the problems start. If the show had any sense of what to do with tone and execution, beyond settling for pastiche and burying its lead performances, it would be a great example of white middle-class hypocrisy in the media. The real story is deserving of richer insight.
Putting aside obvious connections to the original Friday the 13th and the fact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was referenced by law enforcement at the time, the meat of the Montgomery/Gore case is in the trial itself. Candy takes creative liberties to show possible collusion between Montgomery and her team, which included her husband, Pat, and lover, Allan Gore. Everything from her appearance to a contradictory testimonial by Allan in which he denied Candy had been infatuated with him after the affair was called off, serves to divert the jury from accepting a motive that would put her away. But the miniseries leans on the same, tired pageantry and kitschiness of the American Crime Story anthology without any emotional payoff.
We learn truly horrific facts about the murder itself, including how Betty was bludgeoned so intensely that her death was initially thought to be the result of gunshot wounds, and that her newborn baby was left near her corpse until the police discovered the scene. All of this leads to Candy’s shocking acquittal on the grounds of self-defense. The argument was made successfully that Betty took hold of the axe first before having it wrestled away by Candy. Then, according to a psychiatric evaluation presented to the court, the murders commenced in a dissociative state after Candy was triggered by Betty, who supposedly made gestures akin to those of her abusive mother.
The idea, then, is that Candy used this opportunity and pent-up resentment to strike down the people in her life she felt were holding her back. Figuratively and in a more horrific, literal, way. This harrowing revelation is delivered with a wink and a title card informing the viewer that Candy, who is still alive, now serves her community in Georgia as a mental health counselor.
Though it is often understated (if not, outright missing) from the narrative of Lizzie Borden, what binds her and Candy is a support system made up entirely of churchgoers who believe that having a modicum of Jesus in one’s heart is enough to claim innocence, followed promptly by ex-communication from this same community. Their highly publicized cases all but ensured that each respective community had skin in the game. Candy and Lizzie both benefited from, and were later reviled by, the same institutions that dictated the moral politics for everyone in their lives.
It’s reasonable to deduce that they each lived highly a performative existence, and that transgression might have been the only way out. For Lizzie, this aspect has been explored successfully. Contrary to the speculative nature of the better Lizzie Borden films, however, Candy has no real point of view on the murders. And it is difficult to chalk this one up as a win given the real-life circumstances, even for the most ardent “good for her” crowd. What Candy exposes, almost by accident, is a depressing look into white suburban living that builds to a cheap punchline.
At the time of this writing, we have yet to see what HBO has cooked up with its own miniseries on the case. Taking the competitive world of streaming into consideration, however, it feels more than a little ghoulish to keep poking at such a fresh wound. Though there has been a growing conversation around the harm that comes with turning tragedy into content, it is hard to disengage. Especially when the entertainment value of a given project and the need to seek validation for one’s thoughts through online discourse is so enticing.
The easy answer is to just tune off. And, cynically speaking, the media at the time of the Borden murders was as financially invested in the outcome of the trial as current news stations and streaming services would be today. The Fall River Globe and the Fall River Evening Herald were two outlets, divided by class lines, that worked tirelessly to pick apart every detail of Lizzie Borden’s life. Both commanded a cultish following of their own. Then, the scandal dried out and life moved in Fall River.
We’re well over a century removed from these killings and, while the debate is still charged in some circles, the narrative surrounding the Borden murders benefits from an obfuscation of the truth. Regarding the murder of Betty Gore, no amount of cultish behavior or prestigious adaptation can make up for such a straightforward act of brutality, even if the implications can be dramaturgically shaped. Some stories shouldn’t be the stuff of legend.
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