The Trial of Lizzie Borden, page 18
“Yes,” replied Dr. Dolan.
Adams clearly expected Robinson to challenge Dolan’s opinion. Adams said, apparently to Robinson: “Wait a moment. Do you want that?” Knowlton paused politely, then said, “You asked me to wait, so I am waiting.” Snapping to attention, Robinson said that he had objected. Knowlton replied that he had not heard him do so. Adams retreated: “We do not insist upon the objection.” Knowlton then repeated his question and received another affirmative reply. All in all, it was an odd exchange that underscored the very point most damaging to the defense case.
Adams may not have been able to prevent Dolan from giving his opinion about Lizzie Borden’s physical capacity to commit the crime; however, his cross-examination showed the jury that Dr. Dolan had been in less control of the crime scene than he had suggested and that he had perhaps leapt to conclusions about other forensic evidence. Dolan had referred to the state in which he had found the victims as if that were the original state in which they had been found. Adams pointed out one of the policemen (Doherty) “had been there ahead of you and lifted up this woman” and “that Dr. Bowen . . . had pulled out [Abby’s] right hand” to check her pulse. Adams also questioned him about the space between the bed and the bureau in which Abby was found. Doherty had also moved the bed—how much? Adams then asked about the hatchets and axes in the cellar. Dolan admitted, reluctantly, after hearing his own preliminary hearing testimony read back to him, that he had originally thought the claw hammer hatchet was the murder weapon. He claimed that, at that time, he had not yet prepared the skulls and therefore did not fully understand the nature of the injuries. He also admitted that he had mistakenly thought there was human hair on the axe. Overall, it was a dispiriting performance by a key prosecution witness.
Summarizing the afternoon’s events, Julian Ralph concluded: “The seventh day of the Borden trial did not discredit the reputation the cause has earned as unique and crowded with sensations. Gore and hatchets, axes, plaster casts that might have been borrowed from a Bowery chamber of horrors, bloody garments, bits of bloody carpet and blood-spattered furniture and house fittings—these were the stage properties in this legal drama.” Yet he also noticed something interesting about Lizzie Borden herself on the first day of intense medical testimony: “It is said that this woman has no art. That is a mistake . . . Whenever the lawyers who oppose her come to the subject of bloodstains, and the discussion of the gory details of the murders, she hides her face in her hands, but when her own lawyers take up the same subjects of inquiry she keeps her head up and her eyes bright, and tries not to miss a word of what is said. At first it was thought that she could not endure the horrible topic, but enough time has passed to show that it depends upon who discusses it.” “Of course,” he quickly added, stepping back from the implications of his observation, “this is very natural, and quite feminine, and amounts to nothing one way or the other.”
TUESDAY, JUNE 13, 1893
* * *
On Tuesday, a light rain in the early morning “seemed only to intensify the discomfort and the irritation of all enveloped by the steaming atmosphere.” But this repeat of the prior week’s heat wave did nothing to dampen the prospective spectators’ enthusiasm for the trial. “Surely,” wrote Elizabeth Jordan, “the green grass and the flowers and the waving trees are a prettier sight than the mortuary relics and the awful human misery within, but the women of New Bedford do not seem to think so.” The courthouse, according to Joe Howard, “was the scene of universal attraction, the mecca toward which all footsteps tended.” Over an hour before the courtroom opened, “the same old crowd was on hand . . . It took four stalwart policemen to hold the three-foot gate, and they were being worsted in the fight when the deputy at the door came to their rescue with a signal to ‘let them come,’ given ten minutes early.” The unexpected arrival of a truant officer “created a panic among the messenger boys. Some of them have been playing ‘hookey’ to get into the trial and as a purely outside issue earn a few spare quarters.” By contrast, the interior of the courthouse was serene: Lizzie Borden arrived at “her usual time, five minutes before 9 o’clock.” Though “clad a la mode,” she appeared pale, perhaps “anticipating the horrors of the day.” For her, the horrors began with the spectators: “the wild-eyed, haggard-featured, thick-skinned women” in the audience “stared at her through their spectacles and opera glasses as though she were a beast.” Julian Ralph lamented that the women “create a hostile atmosphere in the courtroom” and “in that cruel environment the prisoner sits every day . . . the loneliest girl of wealth and social position in all America.”
Upon arriving, the attorneys immediately went to the judges’ room for a private meeting. But whatever the legal teams discussed took no more than five minutes and the proceedings resumed. It was to be a day, in Julian Ralph’s words, of “blood, skulls, and bowels.”
Dr. Dolan returned to the stand, the first medical expert in a series of witnesses. All were called to establish the estimated times of death, the interval between the murders, and the likely weapon used. The longer the interval between the two murders, the harder it would have been for an outside assailant to lurk in the house undetected. The prosecution also hoped to show that one or more of the hatchets in the house could have been the murder weapon. The identification of the murder weapon cut, as it were, both ways. If the prosecution could not point out the murder weapon, then it needed a theory of its disposal to shore up its case against Lizzie Borden. But the absence of a murder weapon also seemed inconsistent with an outside murderer. It was one thing to imagine a murderer escaping into the midday traffic; it was quite another to imagine his carrying away a bloody hatchet.
Adams resumed Dr. Dolan’s cross-examination. He sought to unsettle the timeline, to narrow the interval between the murders and to push Andrew’s time of death as late as possible. The defense wanted to give its hypothetical intruder more time to enter and to exit unobserved. To do so, Adams questioned how Dolan arrived at the time of death. The answer was threefold: blood coagulation, body temperature, and state of digestion. But, under pressure, Dolan admitted that blood coagulation was not a reliable indicator of the time of death after fifteen minutes. What about body temperature? Dolan explained that Andrew was still warm, yet Abby felt cool to the touch. Adams affected skepticism: Dolan used no thermometer. How could he be certain? Well, there was always the digestion. Assuming both Abby and Andrew ate their breakfast together, as Bridget Sullivan and John Morse had testified, then the progress of the solids through their respective intestinal tract would provide the answer. Unlike Abby’s, Andrew’s intestine contained solid feces, suggesting that he died more than an hour later. Unfazed, Adams observed, “Well, the stomach is a rebellious member of the body . . . and often doesn’t perform its duty well?” He asked if food sometimes passed through the intestines undigested. Dolan said that would not happen in a normal stomach and neither Abby’s nor Andrew’s stomach showed any evidence of inflammation that would account for such dysfunction. But, Adams wondered, could Dolan be certain that was not the case here, especially in light of the food poisoning incident? Dolan grudgingly admitted it was possible and, therefore, that the intestinal contents were not sufficient to provide a definitive time of death. By the end of Adams’s cross-examination, it was easy to forget that, taken together, the scientific evidence of time of death was clear.
But Adams was not finished. Knowlton had already explored the wounds in detail; the defense wanted its own turn. As Julian Ralph observed, “Horror has been piled upon misery . . . For two days the medical examiner has been going over and over the bloody details of the two murders.” It was too much for some listeners. Juror Hodges, the oldest man on the jury, felt woozy and seemed on the verge of fainting, forcing a brief recess until “vigorous fanning, strong salts, and a change of position” restored him and permitted the trial to resume.
The number and size of the wounds gave the defense a useful argument about the murder weapon. Did the prosecution really have a plausible candidate? What sort of a weapon could have produced wounds of varying size and depth? The claw-hammer hatchet, initially thought to be the murder weapon, was about four and a half inches long. The handleless or “hoodoo” hatchet was only three and a half inches long. Yet, one of Abby’s deepest wounds was only about two inches wide and others were much longer. At the preliminary hearing, Dr. Dolan had favored the claw hammer as the murder weapon; the day before, he preferred the “hoodoo” hatchet. He agreed with Knowlton that “nothing in the length of wounds . . . is inconsistent with their having been inflicted by a weapon, for example, of three and one half inches in length.” Adams suggested an even more basic explanation, asking: “Is there anything unreasonable in a cutting edge four and a half inches in length making a wound on the head or face four and a half inches in length?” The handleless hatchet presented another problem: Was it really sharp enough to have bisected Andrew’s eye? Adams asked Dolan if the hatchet had “a good edge, a sharp cutting edge?” Dolan’s affirmative prompted a sarcastic follow-up question: “Did you observe that the edge is turned?” When Dolan claimed not to see it, Adams was incredulous and redoubled his attack: “[N]otwithstanding the anatomy of the eye . . . you think a blow which cuts through these three outer coverings and the humor inside—this injury could have been done by a hatchet?”
Flustered by the hatchet question, Dr. Dolan also admitted that blood spatter would have reached the assailant. But he did so reluctantly. Howard observed that Dolan, “an excellent arguer, seemed to have an idea that he must bother the defense as much as possible.” Denying he had ever believed that the murderer stood in the dining room, reaching around the doorjamb to kill Andrew, Dolan explained that the assailant likely stood at the head of the sofa and, in Adams’s formulation, “rained blow after blow, left and right.” He agreed that the murderer would have been spattered with blood on the upper part of the body and also the hands. Dolan believed that, after stunning Abby with an initial blow, the murderer stood astride Abby’s body. That position would, of necessity, result in some blood spatter as well.
Professor Edward S. Wood, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Adams repeatedly attempted to lure Dolan into an opinion that the blows were delivered with great force. The blows that entered Abby’s skull had to pass through a mass of hair as well as a thick part of the skull itself. Dolan would not commit to a description of Abby’s hair. Howard wrote: “Although this gentleman has cut off Mrs. Borden’s head, he could tell nothing about her hair, but he knew all about the wounds, which he had examined and counted, and which he described with such graphic zeal as to send the red blood to the prisoner’s face and the hot tears to her eyes, both of which she hid as well as she could with her handkerchief and eyes.” Dolan, however, stood firm on the most critical point that the blows required no more than ordinary strength. Indeed, all the medical professionals agreed that a woman could have inflicted the wounds, but the very brutality of the murders favored the defense and was worth emphasizing. Moreover, Howard argued, “thus far the learned brothers have not taken a step to establish the guilt of the accused, nor have they put in one scintilla of testimony which connects her with the case or which does not trend just as certainly in the direction of Bridget Sullivan as in that of Lizzie Borden.”
The next witness, Dr. Edward S. Wood, was a professor of chemistry at Harvard Medical School. Wood was the first of a distinguished roster of prosecution medical experts. A “red-faced, gray-haired, stalwart, and handsome man,” he looked less like a scientist than “an army officer burned brown by a long life on the plains.” He may have been built like “a heavy-weight pugilist,” but he was the most distinguished expert at the trial. He alone had years of experience, including investigations of several hundred medicolegal poison and bloodstain cases. As Howard explained, “Knowlton, in his most gracious way, gently led the professor along a commendatory autobiography, eliciting the fact that he is an expert in medical chemistry and is in every sense on the topmost twig of his branch of a dignified and honorable profession.”
Wood testified that he received an express box containing the Borden’s stomachs. Later, he received a trunk containing a hatchet, dresses, and carpet and hair samples. Wood began “with a recital of the most repellent, bloody, and altogether unpleasant things that not even a Borden trial could be expected to bring out.” Yet, as with the earlier grisly medical testimony, Lizzie seemed transfixed. According to Ralph, “Lizzie Borden’s interest in his testimony, bloody and hideous as it was, had no shadow of concealment. It amazed this semi-rustic girl to meet with a man who could extract eloquence from mute, insensate things.”
Unlike Dolan, Wood gave his testimony in complete paragraphs “as though lecturing to a class, impressing every hearer with its factualness.” First, he examined the stomachs, detailing their contents and concluding that Andrew’s digestion was more advanced than Abby’s. What he had seen chimed with other estimates of their respective times of death. He calculated that Andrew had lived about an hour and a half longer. He had found no poison in the stomachs, nor had he found any in the milk from August 3 or August 4. To rule out different rates of blood absorption in the upstairs and downstairs carpet samples, he performed a ghoulish experiment: “I opened an artery in the leg of a dog, and let about an ounce or two of blood flow upon both pieces of carpet, and I found they absorbed with equal rapidity.”
Wood then turned to the weaponry. He was sent a claw-hammer hatchet with a handle that fit the wounds imperfectly. He subjected the stains on the claw-hammer hatchet “to chemical tests and microscopic tests for the presence of blood, with absolute negative results.” Knowlton interrupted him to ask whether the hatchet could have been used and then cleaned. Wood averred that the hatchet “could not have been washed quickly” because of “cavities in between the head and handle . . . in front and behind.” With the irritation befitting an eminent professor dealing with a remedial student, he added, “I have already pointed them out.” As for the hair found on the hatchet, he found only one in the envelope, not two, and concluded it was animal hair, likely belonging to a cow. Howard gleefully wrote that the neighboring cow then “broke forth into a long and most emphatic wail, just as the expert on the stand testified.”
Wood had more to say about the other hatchet he examined, the now infamous handleless hatchet the prosecution believed was the likely murder weapon. He discussed “a white film upon both sides . . . adherent tightly . . . in little cavities here in the rusty surface . . . white dirt, like ashes.” As for whether the hatchet could have been cleaned, Wood agreed that it could have been before the handle was broken. These questions prompted repeated objections from Adams. Wood was allowed to answer and further testified that it could not have been broken for long or it would have been “darker and dirtier.” On cross-examination, Adams pointed out the “slot on the inner edge of the head” and suggested that “it would be quite a place to clean.” Wood agreed. Adams also suggested a plausible explanation for the layer of white dust—it could have fallen into damp ashes.
Wood then moved on to the clothing he had been sent. Except for the white under skirt, he had found no blood. He testified that he found a tiny blood spot—even smaller than the one-sixteenth of an inch estimated—measuring exactly one-thirty-two-forty-third of an inch (1/3243) on the under skirt. It was “thicker upon the outside than upon the inside,” leading him to hypothesize that it “probably came on to the skirt from the outside . . . and not from the inside.” However, he could not rule out a natural source for the blood spot. On cross-examination, Adams asked if he could exclude menstrual blood. Wood replied that he could not.
The issue of menstruation was a critical point, yet neither the defense nor the prosecution wished to emphasize it. Joe Howard set the tone, writing with uncharacteristic vagueness of the blood spot, “The defense claim, for reasons not necessary to publish . . . that this blood is natural.” During Assistant Marshal Fleet’s testimony, Robinson introduced the subject of the toilet pail in the cellar and said: “It is agreed that the pail contains the napkins which had been worn within a day or two by the defendant—ordinary monthly sickness—and as to that fact that is all we propose to put in. We do not care to go into the details. It is also agreed that the sickness ended Wednesday night.” Robinson was content to let that fact explain the bloody towels soaking in the cellar toilet pail as well as the spot of blood on Lizzie’s inner skirt and to move quickly on. But the prosecution’s reluctance to explore the issue was surprising. Menstruation, according to medical experts, made women vulnerable to criminal impulses. When Doherty began to describe the pail of bloody towels found during his search of the cellar, Moody curtly interrupted, “Pass from those.” Even Borden’s suspicious nocturnal visit to the cellar the night after the murders, recounted by Officer Hyde earlier that day, was largely assumed to be related to her “monthly illness.” Despite the potential significance of the evidence, the men all let the matter drop; they averted their gaze from the contents of the pail as if it would require staring into the abyss.
Though neither side wished to explore the bloody contents of the pail, they were quite happy to discuss blood spatter. The defense sought to make the crimes as bloody as possible—given the lack of blood found on Lizzie. But Wood was initially unhelpful. He insisted that, given the nature of the blows, blood “might spatter in any direction and might not spatter in every direction.” So perhaps the assailant would not have been covered with blood. On cross-examination, Adams methodically worked through the likely scenarios to demonstrate that the murderer could not have avoided blood spatter. Wood agreed that, if Andrew’s assailant had been standing behind him, then “I don’t see how he could avoid being spattered” above the waist. Also, if one assumed the assailant stood astride Abby, there would have been blood spatter over the lower part of the body. Like Dolan before him, then, Wood finally agreed that the murders were a bloody affair. By the end of the day, Howard expressed his frustration with the medical witnesses: “Witness after witness goes over the same story, describes that with which the jury are nauseatingly familiar, proving again and again facts about which there is no dispute, that the Bordens are dead, that they were brutally murdered, that there was blood all over the place, that they had eaten a mild and moderate breakfast, all of which was found in their several intestinal parts, some digested and some not—and that’s all.”
