The Trial of Lizzie Borden, page 24
Knowlton did his best to resurrect the prosecution’s theory of consciousness of guilt—shown by the dress burning and the purported conversation in the matron’s room. According to the Fall River Daily Herald, Knowlton “advanced toward her with something like the impetus of a locomotive and he shook her bits of testimony as a terrier would shake a rat.” Elizabeth Jordan viewed the beginning of Knowlton’s cross-examination with alarm. Turning the scene into a set piece for a sentimental novel, she reminded readers of Knowlton’s “rasping, unrelenting, irritating and not infrequently bullying methods of cross examination” of Lizzie at the inquest and feared for Emma, “now turned over to his tender mercies.” According to Jordan, Lizzie “visibly shrank back in her chair, and at the first sound of his voice gave him a startled glance.”
Jordan made much of the contrast in the two figures: “She looked very frail and weak compared to the stocky, bulldog build of the lawyer.” Contrary to Jordan’s imagined fears, Emma held up well under Knowlton’s cross-examination, keeping her eyes focused on him and answering his questions clearly and precisely. Julian Ralph reveled in the contest between the “[c]olossus pitted against the slender sister of the prisoner,” noting how “she turned a cold, steely eye, a set mouth, and proudly held head” toward Knowlton.
Knowlton brought into focus the tension in the Borden household, forcing Emma to admit that Andrew Borden’s gift to Abby’s sister caused “trouble” that was not remedied by his gift of the grandfather’s house on Ferry Street to his daughters. Knowlton inquired: “Was there some complaint that it was not an equivalent?”
Emma admitted that their grandfather’s house was, if anything, more valuable. Yet it did not repair the breach.
Knowlton pressed on: “Were the relations between you and Lizzie and your stepmother as cordial after that occurrence?”
Emma answered carefully: “Between my sister and Mrs. Borden they were.” Knowlton read several extracts from her prior testimony that seemed to acknowledge Lizzie’s ill will. She admitted that Lizzie began to call Abby “Mrs. Borden” rather than “Mother” at about the time her father intervened to purchase Abby’s stepmother’s share in the house on Fourth Street. As Ralph observed, “He could not shake her testimony on any main point, so he took to prodding her on the shadings and edgings and lacework of the meanings of words and the smallest details.” In frustration after one such exchange, Emma said, “I don’t say I didn’t say it, if you say I did. I don’t remember saying it.”
In the afternoon, Knowlton redoubled his attack. The missing note, the dress burning, and the quarrel in the station all pointed to Lizzie’s consciousness of guilt. What happened to the note from a sick friend that Lizzie offered as an explanation for Abby’s apparent absence on August 4? Had she searched for it? Emma said, “I think I only looked in a little bag that she carried downstreet with her sometimes, and in her work basket.” She admitted that they had advertised unsuccessfully for the writer (or messenger) in the Fall River Daily Evening News, a newspaper with “a large circulation.” Knowlton questioned Emma about the dress burning. Didn’t Alice say, “I wouldn’t let anybody see me do that, Lizzie”?
Emma replied, “I don’t say it was not said. I say that I didn’t hear it.” He then questioned Emma’s description of Alice Russell as a “calling friend” rather than an “intimate friend.” The fact that Alice had been such a reluctant witness gave greater weight to her testimony. The closer the friendship, the less likely any untoward suspicion. Hadn’t she stayed for four nights at the Borden house after the murders? Knowlton had pointed out that the dress had been stained while the dressmaker was still at the house and “notwithstanding the paint she wore it mornings.” What, he implied, was the urgency in destroying it months later? Regarding the matron’s story of a quarrel, he tried to pin her down on the physical details. Did she, for example, sit in the chair as Mrs. Reagan had said? These and other details would shore up the matron’s story. And, finally, he introduced the subject of “waterproofs,” raincoats that might have protected the assassin from blood splatter. Jennings, however, punctured the potential shock: Lizzie’s waterproof was still in the closet.
Howard remarked of Emma’s performance: “She stood with perfect self-possession on the stand, answered with deliberation and decision every question and met the skillful cross-examination of Mr. Knowlton without defiance, but with an evident determination to have the meaning of her well-weighed words thoroughly understood.” Elizabeth Jordan concluded: “Mr. Knowlton’s cross-examination was so fruitless that even people who sympathize[d] with the prosecution turned to each other and smiled.” Emma, however, was apparently less confident that “she had done her sister’s cause . . . any good.” She asked Jennings plaintively “why he had called her, when he had more than enough evidence without her.”
Jennings still needed confirmation that the dress Lizzie burned had indeed been stained with paint. John Grouard, the housepainter, testified on Thursday that he had painted the Borden house in May 1892. Lizzie had supervised his paint mixing in the barn and then approved his test patch on the house. That explained the source of the paint. The dressmaker Mary Raymond swore that Lizzie’s Bedford cord dress did have paint on the hem. She had made it during her three weeks’ tenure that May. It was, she said, “light blue with a dark figure, and made of cheap cotton.” The dress “had a blouse waist, and a full skirt, straight widths,” with “ruffle around the bottom.” Jennings managed to sneak in the notion of routine dress burning, asking the dressmaker what Lizzie had done with the old wrapper that the Bedford cord had replaced. Mary Raymond answered: “She cut some pieces out of it and said she would burn the rest.” Knowlton objected: the part about burning was not based on her own knowledge. But, of course, the jury had heard the exchange.
With the main event of the day over, the remaining witnesses seemed anticlimactic. So nervous was Dr. Bowen’s wife, Phoebe, when she took the stand that her hand shook while she tried to drink a glass of water. She testified that she had gone to the house after the murders. She saw Lizzie “reclining in a chair, with her head resting against Miss Russell.” She said: “I thought she had fainted, she was so white, until I saw her lip or chin quiver, and then I knew she hadn’t fainted.” Significantly, she testified that she saw no blood on Lizzie Borden: she especially noticed how “very white” her hands were “as they laid against her dark dress, in her lap.” For Knowlton, “clean and white” hands cast doubt on Lizzie’s claim to have been in the barn looking for sinkers. For the defense, all that really mattered was the absence of blood. Like her husband, Phoebe Bowen “noticed nothing unusual about the dress” and insisted she could not describe the dress in much detail. All she could say was that the dress “had a blouse waist, with a white design on it.”
The defense also recalled two witnesses, Lizzie’s friend Mary Brigham and Annie White, the stenographer who took notes at the inquest. Jennings asked Mary Brigham about the day of the alleged quarrel in the matron’s room, which he pinpointed as “the afternoon of the day when some experiments were made with an egg.” She testified that the reporter Edwin Porter had been talking with Matron Reagan. Mrs. Reagan had told her: “That reporter has come after me again, and I told him that I had nothing to tell him.” She also said Mrs. Reagan said she would have signed the affidavit prepared by Lizzie’s friends had the marshal not told her not to do so. Mary also detailed her own amateur sleuthing. After the murders, she experimented with the spring lock on the front door, discovering, as Jerome Borden had testified, that “the spring lock was not sure.” Mr. Morse joined in, lying prone on the guest room floor, so that the others could determine if he was visible from the hall. She said that she could not see him from the hall, only when she “advanced a few feet into the room.”
Robinson then recalled the stenographer Annie White to confirm something Bridget Sullivan said and something Assistant Marshal Fleet did not. At the inquest, Bridget Sullivan had indeed said that Lizzie “seemed to be more excited than I ever saw her” and that “she was crying” when she first told her that Andrew had been killed. Assistant Marshal Fleet, however, had never testified that Lizzie had told him, as he had claimed during the trial, that “her father was feeble and [she] went to him and advised and assisted him to lie down upon the sofa.”
The prosecution had its own slate of rebuttal witnesses. Moody recalled Marshal Hilliard to give his own account of the Reagan imbroglio. After he had heard of the quarrel the morning of Thursday, August 25 (the first day of the hearing), he went to see her at her house that night. The following afternoon, Mr. Buck entered his office, trailed by Mrs. Reagan, and showed Hilliard the affidavit she had apparently agreed to sign. Hilliard testified that he told Mrs. Reagan, “If you sign that paper, you do it in direct violation of my orders. If you have got anything to say about this you will say it on the witness stand in Court.” Moody then recalled Officer Mullaly to recount his conversation with Hymon Lubinsky, the ice cream peddler. According to Mullaly, he interviewed Lubinsky on August 8. Lubinsky told him he had seen a woman walking from the barn toward the house at 10:30 a.m. on August 4. Mullaly produced his notebook as corroboration. Robinson questioned whether he had properly investigated the timing or simply learned that Lubinsky’s route usually started around that time.
Moody then recalled Annie White to read three significant exchanges from the preliminary hearing. The transcript showed that passerby Alfred Clarkson had originally claimed to have arrived at the murder scene about 11:40 a.m. (and not 11:30, as he had said the day before). Regarding the relations in the Borden household, Emma had been more forthcoming about the tension in the house at the preliminary hearing. When asked whether “the relations between you and your stepmother” were “cordial,” she replied, “I don’t know how to answer that. We always spoke.” She added, “[P]erhaps I should say no then.” She also admitted that relations between Abby and Lizzie were not “entirely cordial.” When Knowlton inquired about the reason, Emma answered: “Well, we felt she was not interested in us, and at one time father gave her some property, and we felt we ought to have some too; and he afterwards gave us some.” But that gift, as Knowlton framed it, “did not entirely heal the feeling.” Moody also asked Annie White to read Phoebe Bowen’s description of the dress Lizzie Borden wore the morning of the murders. Then she had called it “a blouse waist of blue material, with a white spray . . . running through it.”
After a brief consultation, the prosecution decided not to wait for its last witness, then on his way from Fall River. (The tardy witness was a lad who would have contradicted the testimony of Barlow and Brown, the boys who said they had searched the barn for the killer.) Instead came the announcement: “The evidence is closed on both sides.”
Chief Justice Mason then admonished the jury that “notwithstanding the evidence is all in, there is much more to be submitted to them, and they should keep their minds open . . . until the last word has been said, and the case finally committed to them.” Yet they could not have been unmindful of the fraught atmosphere. As Joe Howard observed: “There has been no communication between the jury and public since they were impaneled two weeks ago . . . Tell me they don’t know what popular sentiment is and public feeling? That’s nonsense, for they are part of the populace themselves.”
SATURDAY, JUNE 17, AND SUNDAY, JUNE 18, 1893
* * *
For the jurors, this meant another weekend in the hotel, away from their homes and families, with only each other as company. Elizabeth Jordan lamented: “No convicts at hard labor in Sing Sing prison are under stricter surveillance than the Borden jurors.” On Sunday, the jurors agreed to attend church. Howard followed them, observing their military cadence: “Tramp, tramp, tramp, up the street moved the double line.” Once seated at the Trinitarian Church, “Sheriffs occupied the end seats in the pews to see that no brother escaped before the benediction was pronounced.” Taking 1 Corinthians 1:17 (“For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel”) as his text, Reverend Julien told his congregation and their guests: “Clothes did not make the man or the woman; that a black heart could beat beneath a dress suit or a silk dress; that human nature is much the same in all; that moral tendencies and the power of control may differ.” The seriousness of the message and its meaning for the duty that still lay ahead of them did not affect their appetites. After a “remarkably hearty dinner at the hotel,” the jurors took an excursion to Dartmouth, “packed in like sardines, perspiration taking the place of oil.” Whether they enjoyed the trip was not reported.
Unlike his judicial colleagues, Judge Dewey remained in New Bedford for the weekend. He had also attended the church service, sitting a dozen pews behind the jurors. He, too, treated himself to an outing, apparently walking to Clark’s Point, more than four miles from the city center. Later that afternoon, he sat by himself on a large rock. “The brisk harbor breeze was dallying with his iron-gray hair and the sunlight was reflected from his shining silk hat,” reported Joe Howard. “He looked happy, just and contented.”
For the lawyers, it was a busy weekend. Knowlton walked his normal route from home to office and back again. He found time, however, to go to church on Sunday. Robinson, busy crafting his closing argument, took only short breaks for meals. Ralph humorously described him as “working like a beaver, or rather, a lawyer, for lawyers work a good sight harder than beavers.” Howard observed Robinson as he “dashed down to breakfast at the hotel, dashed back; hurried down to dinner and hurried back; flitted down at supper time and flitted back.” By contrast, “Col. Adams,” Howard wrote, “was taking things more moderately, and getting more of the good things of this life to eat and drink. He dallied for some time over the supper table particularly.”
The courthouse also enjoyed a respite: “For the past two weeks its windows have been crowded with spectators; its halls and corridors filled with officers and waiting witnesses; its anterooms occupied by attorneys and stenographers; its back yard turned topsy turvy by telegraph operators and newspaper men and its sidewalks lined with unfortunate ones who did not get around in time to enter the portals of the charmed structure.” Over the weekend, the windows were wide open and the building vacant. Outside, “The sidewalk [was] frequented by pedestrians who hurried to and fro in attendance on their every day business, while the hive of industry in the back yard looked like a closed-up bar room in a no-license town.” Howard reported that the members of the exclusive Wamsutta Club (“nobody admitted under eighty years of age”) looked forward to reclaiming their croquet lawn to the rear of the courthouse.
• • •
Over the weekend, the reporters were at loose ends. The judges, except for Dewey, were out of town; the lawyers were working and inaccessible; and the jurors were, as always, under guard. The only news of the prisoner, according to Julian Ralph, “was that she has slept well and eaten well and been visited by ex-Gov. Robinson.” Elizabeth Jordan took the opportunity of the pause in action to debunk the popular image of Lizzie Borden as a “human sphinx.” In an extended profile, entitled “This Is the Real Lizzie Borden,” she contrasted the “very real and very wretched woman . . . on trial for her life in the little courthouse at New Bedford, Mass.” with the “journalistic creation,” which she termed “a thing without heart or soul . . . large, coarse, and heavy.” Jordan offered herself as the unbiased observer of the “real” Lizzie. “From the top of her head to the broad sensible soles of her French kid boots,” Jordan averred, “she is a gentlewoman . . . a ‘lady.’ ” Far from a “sphinx,” Lizzie was a “terrified woman, entirely conscious of the horror of her position, but bearing herself with the dignity which is her own.” She was also, warned Jordan, “on the verge of collapse.”
While the lawyers polished their closing arguments, nearby, in her cell, Lizzie Borden read. Her long confinement had given her the leisure to work her way through most of the novels of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. On this last weekend of her trial, she turned to slighter fare, the “summer novels” Robinson had given her. Joe Howard wondered whether the chimes of the church bells prompted “memories of the past . . . or did anxiety for the future prevail?” She had no callers—except Andrew Jennings, who permitted himself only a brief visit, presenting her with a large red rose “with his little boy’s compliments.” For everyone involved in the trial, Sunday was “a dull day of anxious waiting.”
Chapter 10
LAST WORDS IN THE GREAT TRIAL
Early-morning scene about the New Bedford courthouse, Boston Globe
On its editorial page, the New York Times lauded “the conduct of the Borden trial” as “a model proceeding” and “a credit alike to the bench and the bar of Massachusetts.” Joe Howard singled out the professionalism of the lawyers for special praise: “Another interesting and striking feature is the cordial courtesy that obtains among the counsel. There seems to be a perfect understanding on both sides . . . an interplay of fraternity, most charming to witness. Sometimes I think it almost too good to be genuine, too millennial, as it were, but I am convinced by daily observation and some knowledge of the men that it is honest and truly comradic.” To Ralph, accustomed to the rough-and-tumble New York City practice, “The temper of the lawyers is peculiar. They work in almost unbroken harmony, each side treating the other side in a friendly, polite, and respectful manner.” Robinson himself made a point of exempting the prosecuting lawyers from his criticism of the underlying case. Knowlton, he declared, “has only one duty . . . and he walks into this Court room only as the representative of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that is yours and mine and his . . . He is not here for blood, neither is he helped to such dishonorable work, if it were attempted, by our excellent friend, the District Attorney from the great county of Essex, one of our best and most reliable lawyers. So you will see no small play; you will see no mean tactics on the part of the Commonwealth here.”
