The Lizzie Borden Society archive

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1. "Now, who would kill a cat!"
Posted by joe on Jan-22nd-02 at 1:14 PM

Imagine that, to kill a cat.  I  recalled that Lizzie may possibly have killed Abby's cat.  Read that someplace.  So in my internet searchings, I ran across this at curiouschapbooks.com:

It is difficult to say if the death of Mrs. Borden's cat occurred before or during this feud. It in itself would be cause enough for Mrs. Borden to fear her stepdaughter. Borden scholars Pearson and Radin both allude to the rumors of Lizzie's cruelty to animals despite the evidence of her will's munificent bequest to the Fall River Animal Rescue Society. Robert Sullivan, in his objective research of the case, Good-bye Lizzie Borden, actually interviewed Mrs. Abby Whitehead Potter (Abby Borden's niece and namesake), who remembered her aunt and this chilling tale:

Lizzie Borden had company and my aunt had a tabby cat and the cat was trained so that it would touch the latch -- you know, it was [sic] latches in those days -- she'd touch the latch and the door would open. So the cat went in where Lizzie was entertaining and she took it out and shut the door again, and came back so this is what she told Aunt Abby and Abby told my mother; Lizzie Borden finally excused herself and went downstairs -- took the cat downstairs -- and put the carcass on the chopping block and chopped its head off. My aunt for days wondered where that cat was -- all she talked about. Finally, Lizzie said, 'You go downstairs and you'll find your cat.' My aunt did (Sullivan, 23).

Naw, Lizzie wouldn't do that..... Or would she?

Well, Abby Potter was near ninety and hardly unbiased now, was she?

Do you suggest she was a little senile, Bob, and she made this up?  Sullivan sounds so convincing.  But, then, so does Brown.  Don't know who to believe, I guess.

Yea, Abby Whitehead Potter liked to stir the pot.  Maybe because the Whiteheads didn't get much out of the murders.  The cat-stuff is the sort  of "second-generational" rumors that we have to be wary of--by "second-generational" I mean told by the NExt generation, but also so-and-so told so-and-so and THEY told me.
Let me transcribe for you a portion of an article in the LBQ, Oct. 2000, by Thomas C. Leonard, an Associate Dean on the staff of the Graduate School of Journalism, at USC, Berkeley, called "Parricide On The QT:  Notoriety and Knowingness At The Dawn Of New Media, pgs.10-11. (I knew the cat stories would come up; they seem to rise out of the ashes 2x a year, so I marked this one for the next time...)  (It has to do with the importance of gossip before there was media).

"...She (Lizzie) lived until 1927, and to accuse her (in the newspapers) of a crime risked legal trouble from a wealthy woman.   Publishers worried about their liability in reprinting the ballad (Forty Whacks).  This helps to explain why GOSSIP was a strong channel for her DEFAMATION.  Here too, an older trans-Atlantic discourse was far more useful to her enemies than any new media.

Through eight decades that we can document, New Englanders have been willing to lower their voices and say that Lizzie Borden was a cat killer.  The feline Executioner narrative flooded into the prosecutor in 1892, and really never stopped circulating in Yankee parlours.  In the 1920's, a student of the crime found that the story 'is repeated, with shuddering horror, wherever her name is mentioned.' (*May be Pearson-me)  Seventy-five years after her acquittal, Fall Riverites were still gossipping about what she had done to cats.  Long before the double murders, so the stories go, Lizzie is entertaining when a cat or kitten disturbs a guest.  The hostess excuses herself, leaves the room with the pet, and returns with the announcement that the feline will trouble them no more.  She has chopped off it's head.  The lady declares:  'That cat won't ever bother you again!'

The tellers of these tales were RENDERING A VERDICT on Lizzie Borden that was just as clear as in the ballad.  People who could not bring themselves to CALL HER A PARENT BUTCHER, COULD Call Her A Cat Chopper and MAKE THEIR POINT.  Where the criminal law was inadequate, Aesop seemed to help.

The way an anthropologist would put this is that cats were good to think with in making sense of the homicides.  Language for this line of thought was in the popular culture of all social classes across the Atlantic.  These stories 'sound like fairy tales',one gossip said before the trial.  Robert Darnton's scholarship, in particular, is a reminder that they certainly do.  Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm made the feline into diabolic creatures, such as Puss in Boots.  Lizzie Borden herself seemed more than a bit like these tricksters as she spun stories for investigators, kept her mouth shut at trial, and escaped with her life from the courthouse.  No wonder that Lizzie Borden detractors spoke of 'the feline blood-lust of a preying, vengeful tigeress.'

But why make Lizzie Borden into a cat executioner?  This would seem to be a very exotic form of notoriety.  In fact, the infamy of cat killers was well advertised.  William Hogarth had devoted a print to condemning the practice and the new anti-cruelty societies of the mid-nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic encouraged this exposure.  Outing cat torturers was a Victorian pastime.  When John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln in 1865, it did not take long for the press to discover that cats were his earliest victims.

....The death sentences for cats in New England, as in (Alice's Adventures In) Wonderland, are part of a burlesque legalism of Fact Finding, Decrees, and Summary Judgements.  Just as the ballad (Forty Whacks) was a people's COUNTER VERDICT, the cat stories mocked the judicial process itself.*

The songs and GOSSIP of the Victorian world may seem an odd place to go to examine first principles of media history.  But actual demonstration of what people thought they knew and how they came to know it is the story that must be put together before the role of technological innovations can be accurately described....But in the Victorian world, electronic media had to compete with the Penetrating And SUBVERSIVE FORCE of older ways of telling stories.  The celebrated inventions that connected the world were, at times, irrelevant to the formation of special bodies of knowledge....."

*--(Footnote #21)--"For the record, Lizzie Borden was one of Fall River's most conspicuous animal lovers.  She put up feeders for birds and squirrels, kept dogs and cats(?), and was a friend of the Animal Rescue League."

---I'm gald you brought that qustion up, Joe, as it needs to be addressed often--also not many have the resourses of the LBQ, and so an inquirying mind can help bring out these tid-bits for others......kat
---thanks for bearing with this long post transcription --which can be printed, if needed.

Nice piece of work, Kat!  Now that I've gone on record as someone who doesn't believe the apochryphal cat tail...um, TALE, I would like to toss in that serial killers (which Miss B., even if she was guilty, was most assuredly NOT, even if our colleague Eric Stedman thinks she killed again, later) often begin their careers by torturing and killing dumb animals (as well as younger children) - it's almost a given, as it crops up in so many recorded cases.  I think Abby Potter may have BELIEVED that story, (bad blood and all) but I don't think that makes it true.  It's a good question, however, if this kind of nastiness on Lizzie's part did occur prior to the slayings, did the witness(es) not come forward out of good ol' (stereotypical?) New England reticence?  There are no letters in the Knowlton collection from anonymouse...um, anonyMOUS visitors to Second Street pushing the cat story, are there?  (Really, are there? I'm at work, and I don't carry it around with me!)

Open to juicy disussion, as ever, BG.       

(Message last edited Jan-23rd-02  10:58 AM.)

Hi All:  I have a couple questions about this story.  I realize that the story told was supposed to have taken place sometime after Mrs. B. married Mr. B. and before they both came to their somewhat unceremonial deaths.  So, how far before the putting on of all the door locks did it occur?  We don't have a date for this story as far as I can see.  Also, did the Borden house, pre-lock time, have knobs on the doors.  Now we have a history of a household that let cats open doors turn into one later that had double and triple locks everywhere. The inclusion in the story of a latch on a door inside that home that presumably a cat could reach up and open doesn't seem to fit to me as the cat would also have had to have the ability to also turn the door knob or didn't they have knobs? 

Which leads me to wonder what room was Lizzie "entertaining in" (and why was she entertaining a woman she presumably didn't like with her step-mother who she also didn't like)?  Since the rooms downstairs didn't have doors on them except for the parlor it must have been the parlor, if downstairs. If upstairs perhaps it was the guest room but that doesn't seem right.  I don't think Lizzie would have had any other women except some that she did like in her own room ever. Perhaps they were all in a small closet. But seriously, did this room they were to have been in have JUST a latch and no knob at some time in the past? And if the door was closed and latched when the ladies were inside being entertained, which required the cat to unlatch it, then how could the door latch be closed from the outside, where the cat presumably entered from? Did another member of the household lock them inside or was the latch spontaneously reinstated?

The story seems strange from another angle. They have Lizzie going downstairs presumably on the spur of the moment after suddenly being stricken with some sort of inner rage and axing a cat, then calmly going back upstairs and resuming her entertaining, shades of what some who think her guilty say, she was somehow possessed like she must have been on the day of the murders of her Dad and step-mom.   Other things seem odd with the story: that the step-mom didn't go downstairs to the basement for days, and if she did that she didn't observe her dead pet, that Lizzie would leave the carcass of a dead cat for all to see on a chopping block, and that if Lizzie took the cat out from a room in which the three women were sitting that Abby Borden didn't think that peculiar right then, follow Lizzie out or find out right then what was going on. It also seems strange that in a house where we have learned the women didn't get on that Abby B. would have ever let Lizzie touch HER cat.

It sounds to me that this story is one that got out of control.  The Aunt was probably visiting her sister, the cat got put in the basement during that time and was later found there, perhaps jumped up on the chopping block scratching to get out. The axing was added later for the amusement of those who found her guilty of the Borden murders in their minds or just because the little girl was confused. 

These are some of my sort of disconnected thoughts for the moment. Bye,

I agree, Abby Whitehead Potter would have good reason to "make up" this cat-killing story about Lizzie, becuase she was Abby's relative and didnt like Lizzie. BUT check this out--another cat-killing incident about Lizzie from an OBJECTIVE source this time. The Boston Herald of August 8, 1892 did an interview with drug store owner Walter J. Brow and he claimed that Lizzie's last perchase at his store (some 4 years before the murders) was chloroform. Lizzie said she wanted the poison to kill a cat. Hmm!

(Message last edited Jan-23rd-02  11:52 PM.)

Yes, if true, she could have wanted to kill a cat to put it out of its misery. If it was for a joy killing, I doubt she would have announced her dispicable deed to the druggist. Since Kat's article on the Victorian sensibility of a cat killer, I would have to think that the "truth" of the story you relate is connected more towards the painless ending of a sick animal than the fun-filled killing of a pesky feline.

Maybe that was the Source of the source.  Really.
A humane cat story turns cruel after a generation...

Hi: I made a boo-boo in my last post. The rooms downstairs did have doors, it was halls the house was missing. I wonder about all these druggists who only remember Lizzie to say she attempted to buy poison from them. Perhaps some of their records would indicate how often she went to buy health medications as their memories don't.  Just a thought.