The Trial of Lizzie Borden, page 14
Melvin Adams, the dapper Boston trial lawyer, rose to question the doctor. He sought to establish that Dr. Bowen did not see Mrs. Borden’s body as he climbed the front stairs—an important point, given Lizzie’s descent from those stairs. (Both Adelaide Churchill and John Morse had seen the body from that vantage point.) He also foreshadowed a key defense argument about Lizzie’s inquest testimony: he asked what Dr. Bowen had given Lizzie for her nerves. Dr. Bowen initially prescribed bromo caffeine, an effervescent salt used to alleviate headaches, and, on Friday, added one-eighth of a grain of sulphate of morphine to be taken before bed. (A grain is the standard apothecary measurement by weight: Dr. Bowen’s initial dose was equivalent to 8 milligrams of morphine.) The next day he doubled the dose, a dose he continued while she was a witness at the inquest. Adams then asked about morphine’s mental effects. Bowen agreed that morphine in the higher quarter-grain dosage could affect memory and cause hallucinations, a point only partly undercut by Moody’s redirect establishing that Dr. Bowen only personally witnessed her taking the bromo caffeine. Joe Howard asked his readers: “If the administration of morphine tends to produce hallucinations in persons unused to taking morphine, what must have been Lizzie’s mental condition after several days of dosing with the stuff?”
Adelaide Churchill, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Dr. Seabury Bowen left the stand disgruntled. Adelaide Churchill, by contrast, relished her time in the spotlight. “A middle aged matron of comfortable build and genteel, placid face,” Adelaide Churchill was “short, stout, active, and willing.” When the police interviewed her on August 8, four days after the murders, she exclaimed: “Must I, am I obliged to tell you all? . . . Well, if I must,” she added, “I do not like to tell anything of my neighbor, but this is as it is.” Her moment had arrived—she entered the courtroom in a “stylish blue dress and black bonnet”—and she delivered her tale in rounded tones suitable for an elocution lesson. (Elizabeth Jordan, in particular, praised the “enunciation of her English,” which she took as a sign of her intelligence.) As Joe Howard put it, “No Mayday queen was ever happier than sister Churchill on the stand.”
Adelaide Churchill explained she was the widowed daughter of the former mayor Edward Buffinton and had lived in the house next door to the Bordens for almost all of her life. On the morning of the murders, she watched Andrew Borden leave in the morning before she went out to do her shopping, and on her way back from Hudner’s market, she had seen Bridget running back from Dr. Bowen’s house. After unloading her purchases in the kitchen, she looked out the window and saw an “excited or agitated” Lizzie leaning against the kitchen door. She asked, “Lizzie, what is the matter?” Lizzie replied, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father.” She eventually led the expedition to discover Abby Borden’s corpse in the guest bedroom, visible from the front stairs. Unlike Dr. Bowen, Adelaide offered a minute description of Lizzie’s dress. She denied it was the dark blue dress shown her by the prosecution. Instead, she said it had a light blue and white mixed groundwork woven together with “a dark navy blue diamond figure on which there was no spot of blood.” Adelaide Churchill would later be recalled and asked if she knew what “Bedford cord” was. She said she did not, but said she thought Lizzie had been wearing cotton.
Alice Russell, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Robinson returned to this point. As with Bridget Sullivan, Robinson led Adelaide Churchill through an exhaustive audit of Lizzie’s clothing, hair, and hands to show that there was no blood on her person. He also took the sting out of her original description of Lizzie’s manner, inducing her to rephrase her comment that Lizzie seemed “excited” to the more appropriate “appeared and looked distressed . . . and frightened.” Alive to the danger a vigilant neighbor—let alone a notorious curtain-twitcher like Mrs. Churchill—might pose to his theory of an outside assassin, he also explored Adelaide Churchill’s myriad household duties. Just as he led Bridget Sullivan to agree that an intruder could have slipped into the house while she was busy washing windows, he implied that Adelaide Churchill was far too busy in her own house to notice what might have been going on next door.
Adelaide Churchill provided the trial audience with an amuse-bouche, but the main course of the day was Alice Russell, Lizzie Borden’s “turncoat friend.” If Adelaide Churchill seemed a stereotypical “merry widow,” Alice Russell, “tall, angular, and thin,” could have passed as the model for a typical New England spinster. Julian Ralph described her as “a slender, trim woman of precise manners, of spare figure and sallow face.” Joe Howard declared: “She held her mouth as though prisms and prunes were its most frequent utterances.” Elizabeth Jordan described her in darker terms, “as though one of the strange women characters in which Wilkie Collins delights, and which flit like ominous specters through deep shadows—through his mysteries—had walked out of the pages of one of the dead novelist’s books into real life and real participation in a tragedy more awful and more wrapped in obscurity than any he ever evolved.”
A former next-door neighbor for over a decade—she had lived in what was now the Kelly house—Alice Russell had recently moved a short distance but remained an intimate friend of both Borden daughters. Aside from the doctor, she was the first person Lizzie Borden thought to summon for help after discovering the murders. She then stayed in the Borden house until after the funeral. But the friendship ended when Alice Russell decided to tell the grand jury about the dress Lizzie burned the Sunday after the murders. She did not make her choice lightly. She had omitted mention of the incident in her original statement to the police, her inquest testimony, and her first appearance before the grand jury. But after agonizing about the oath she had sworn, an oath to tell “the whole truth,” she consulted a lawyer who arranged for Knowlton to recall her to the stand. After she testified at the grand jury about the dress burning, Russell ended her regular visits to Lizzie Borden in jail. It was as if the act of testifying, of unburdening herself of the incriminating details, forced her to recalculate for herself Lizzie Borden’s likely culpability. Significantly, Alice Russell’s change of position reverberated in their circle: Elizabeth Johnston, who had steadfastly refused to tell the police the contents of Lizzie’s letter, also ceased her jail visits.
Despite being certain of her duty, Alice Russell initially seemed a tentative witness. Moody instructed her to speak up twice at the outset of her testimony. From his seat, Robinson even chimed in to ask her to “speak a little louder.” Lizzie Borden, too, moved her chair closer to Melvin Adams and whispered something to him. Alice stood at attention as she testified and, according to Julian Ralph, held her handbag “as though it contained her return ticket to Fall River and she did not propose to lose it under any circumstances.” Elizabeth Jordan viewed her testimony as a betrayal and characterized her demeanor in unflattering terms: “Today she took the witness stand and not only testified to what will come nearer to putting a rope around her girl friend’s neck than anything yet brought out, but she did it with a vicious snap in her voice and a cruel compression of her thin colorless lips, which suggested anything but sorr[ow] for the fact that she was compelled to do this.” Whether or not she regretted her felt obligation to testify, Alice Russell had determined her course. She spoke clearly, tapping her black fan as if to underscore her answers.
Moody first asked Alice Russell about Lizzie’s visit the night before the murders. She testified that Lizzie told her that she had been depressed: “I feel as if something was hanging over me that I cannot throw off; and it comes over me at times, no matter where I am.” As if to puncture the tension in the courtroom, Joe Howard’s favorite cow outside the courthouse “gave three tremendous blasts on her accustomed trombone.” Most in the courtroom laughed, but Alice Russell did not waver. Instead, she began to testify that Lizzie described her father’s enemies, but stopped herself, adding, “Oh, I am a little ahead of the story.” Lizzie had first reported the Bordens’ illness—she heard them “vomiting” and told her everyone was ill except Bridget Sullivan. She feared the milk could be poisoned. Alice questioned whether such a thing would be possible: “I shouldn’t think anybody would dare to come then and tamper with the cans for fear somebody would see them.” Lizzie seemed to accept the improbability but spoke of her father’s “enemy.” She said a man came to see him about renting a property. Her father told him he would not “let his property for such a business.” The man responded “sneeringly” as he was ordered out. Lizzie also said she had seen a strange man lurking around the house. More worrying, the barn had been broken into twice. Alice reassured her that thieves were only after pigeons. Lizzie insisted: “I feel as if I wanted to sleep with my eyes half open—with one eye open half the time—for fear they will burn the house down over us.” She then revealed a startling daytime break-in: “Father forbad our telling it.” She recounted the theft of Abby’s keepsakes, Andrew’s money and streetcar tickets, “and something else I can’t remember.” She continued, “I am afraid somebody will do something; I don’t know but what somebody will do something.” Lizzie Borden left about 9:00 p.m.
Courtroom scene during Alice Russell’s testimony, Boston Globe
The next morning just after 11:00 a.m., Bridget Sullivan arrived with the terrible news. Of the sequence of events that Thursday morning, Alice explained: “It is very disconnected. I remember very little of it.” But on Thursday night she well recalled visiting the darkened cellar with Lizzie. Lizzie brought her slop pail; Alice brought a light. Lizzie went into the water closet room to rinse out the slop pail. They walked through the room containing the bloodstained clothes taken from the bodies.
On Sunday morning, Alice saw Lizzie by the kitchen stove. Emma asked Lizzie what she was going to do. Lizzie replied, “I am going to burn this old thing up; it is covered in paint.” Alice initially left the room, thought the better of it, returned, and said, “I wouldn’t let anyone see me do that, Lizzie.” She noticed it was a “cheap cotton Bedford cord,” light blue with dark figures. The next morning O. M. Hanscom, the Pinkerton detective employed by the family, asked Alice if all of Lizzie’s dresses were still in the house. When she saw Emma and Lizzie in the dining room, she declared, “I am afraid, Lizzie, the worst thing you could have done was to burn that dress. I have been asked about your dresses.”
Lizzie lamented, “Oh, what made you let me do it?”
Robinson’s cross-examination was a masterly attempt at damage control. He tried unsuccessfully to elicit dramatic descriptions of Lizzie Borden’s pallor and distress. He had more success with his familiar catalogue of Borden’s person, getting Alice to agree that there was no blood visible anywhere on Lizzie. He wanted to be as clear as possible that officers had already searched the house, and that they were present on Sunday when Lizzie burned the dress. Despite his skilled manner, Alice Russell seemed immune to his usually infallible charm. In response to her description of the dress as “Bedford cord,” not cambric, Robinson remarked, “No doubt about that, and any woman knows or ought to know the difference between the two, doesn’t she.” Alice tartly replied, “I don’t know as they do.” Yet, that rare rebuff did nothing to undermine Julian Ralph’s belief that Robinson was “without an equal in New York City as a cross-examiner,” observing that “he has not yet found a government witness whom he has not been able to turn more or less to his own account.” For Robinson, the critical point had been made: Lizzie Borden burned a cheap Bedford cord dress. For her part, Lizzie, according to Julian Ralph, “was much less interested in the testimony than the most unconcerned among the persons in the court.” Instead, she studied her fan, “putting the handle of it in her mouth and out again mechanically.”
As if to permit all a change of pace, three witnesses came and went with little fanfare. The local newsdealer John Cunningham recounted his own investigations as he tagged along with reporters from the Fall River Daily Globe and Fall River Daily Herald. Most significantly, he found the cellar door securely locked. In a report to the police, McHenry had observed spiderwebs across the doorjamb of at least a week’s growth. Cunningham also looked for tracks outside in the yard and saw none. Robinson pounced on this point: Did he know that Bridget Sullivan had walked that same area when she went over to the fence to have a chat with the Kellys’ “girl”? His powers of observation called into question, he provided a moment of levity describing Adelaide Churchill as running “triangular” toward the house. “Diagonally, you mean?” offered Moody genially.
Assistant Marshal John Fleet, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Officer George Allen, the first policeman at the scene of the crime, and Deputy Sheriff Francis Wixon testified to their searches of the Borden house. Allen said that the front door had been locked and bolted. In response to Moody’s question, Allen testified that Lizzie Borden had not been crying. Describing Andrew’s body, he offered a poignant detail of his own: he had noticed “how small the ankles was [sic] for the shoes.” His testimony allowed the prosecution to introduce one of “the most horrible exhibits yet seen,” the blood-soaked handkerchief Allen had found lying by Abby’s feet. Moody held it aloft and it “hung like a scarlet banner before the general gaze.” Elizabeth Jordan pronounced it “the sensation of the day.” Lizzie averted her eyes and stared at the floor.
Wixon, a long-serving deputy sheriff, had been paying what he termed a “friendly call” to Marshal Hilliard as the alarm sounded. After Allen reported the full horrors of the situation, Wixon went directly over to see for himself. He had seen grievous wounds during his Civil War service and noticed that Andrew’s wounds appeared “fresh,” while the blood around Abby was coagulated and was “a dark maroon color.” Robinson was quick to object before he could state any conclusion about the order of deaths. Robinson, however, was most interested in what Wixon had done outside the Borden house. He had seen a man’s hat on the other side of the fence and, after climbing over, saw two other men at work. The men may not have seen anything that day, but the mere fact that Wixon could easily scale the fence provided a theoretical avenue of escape for an outside perpetrator.
Assistant Marshal John Fleet—tall, stalwart, good-looking, and intelligent—was the key police witness of the day. Fleet’s story had two key elements: he had heard Lizzie Borden’s declaration that Abby was not her mother and he had found the handleless hatchet. He arrived at the Borden house about 11:45 a.m. He viewed the bodies and then went to Lizzie’s bedroom. There, he found Reverend Buck and Alice Russell with Lizzie Borden. Lizzie told him that she had advised her father to lie down. She explained that she then went to the barn loft. When she returned, she found her father dead. Lizzie effectively ruled out Morse as a suspect and disavowed any suspicion of Bridget Sullivan. When asked if she had any idea who might have killed her father and her mother, she declared: “She is not my mother, sir; she is my stepmother; my mother died when I was a child.” She then volunteered that a man came to the house around nine that morning and, after prompting by Alice Russell, she repeated her story about the angry man who wanted to rent a store.
Fleet then went to the cellar and found Officers Mullaly and Devine looking for a possible murder weapon. They found two axes and two hatchets on the cellar floor. As Moody produced these items for Fleet to identify, they jostled against one another. The noise was jarring, metal against metal, a clanking, according to Julian Ralph, “that sounds terrible to those who sympathize with the prisoner and try to put themselves in her place.” Yet Lizzie seemed more intrigued than horrified by the racket: “[s]he raised her head and looked at the weapons with some show of interest.”
Fleet testified that he spoke to the other officers on the scene (in the dining room and out in the yard). Then he went to search Lizzie’s room himself. This time the door was closed. Dr. Bowen opened the door six to eight inches, asked him what he wanted, and closed the door again. When he reopened the door, Lizzie asked if it was necessary to search the room. Fleet was reluctantly admitted. Lizzie asked him to search as quickly as possible and observed that no one could get into her room so there was really no point in searching. Fleet asked Lizzie about her morning activities. She said she had been in the barn for between twenty minutes to half an hour. She had last seen her stepmother about 9:00 a.m. She also told him that someone had brought a note to Abby.
After searching Lizzie’s room, Fleet returned to the cellar. He saw a box containing a hatchet head with other tools, including pieces of iron. He then described what would become known as the handleless hatchet. He observed a new break in the wood close to the head, and where other implements were covered with dust, this blade, oddly, seemed to have ash on both sides. Robinson interrupted to prevent him from sharing how he imagined a hatchet head might have become covered with ash. He confirmed that the cellar door leading to the backyard was bolted from the inside. He also visited the barn and found it “hot and close” in the loft.
Fleet returned to the house on Saturday just after the funeral procession departed for the cemetery. Significantly, he testified about his search of the upstairs clothes closet. He said that he had not seen a dress with any bloodstains, nor had he found a paint-stained dress. In other words, if Lizzie Borden had burned a dress covered with paint, then where was it at the time of the search? Julian Ralph observed: “A hum ran through the court as the minds of the people grasped the fact that if he did not see the paint-soiled dress, it must have been because it was skillfully hidden.”
