The Trial of Lizzie Borden, page 25
MONDAY, JUNE 19, 1893
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On Monday morning, the police contingent assigned to control the expected spectators was doubled. But it was not enough. Julian Ralph declared: “The mob that besieged the Court house was the greatest that was ever seen around that Ancient Temple of Justice.” The crowd was even rowdier than usual, “more like a surging mob trying to gain admittance to some big show, than to a courtroom where a miserable woman is on trial for her life.” As on the other days, there were more women than men, a mix of “women in silks, and women in calicoes.” Elizabeth Jordan reported: “If the women were frantic to get in before, they were frenzied to-day.” They blocked the front and formed an equivalent human barrier at the rear. Joe Howard noted “hundreds standing for hours outside, in the vain hope of making their way to the courtroom, where every available inch of space was utilized.” It was, as Ralph observed, “packed as only a clever stevedore knows how to load a ship.” Even the corridors were filled. Little wonder, then, that as she entered the courthouse, Lizzie Borden seemed “visibly affected by the great crowd and the great silence that greeted her, and her startled look at the upturned gazing faces indicated how thoroughly her nervous system is strained.” She did not look well, her face “swollen and colored slightly purple.” Joe Howard struggled to imagine her state of mind as she “was brought a third Monday to confront the commonwealth, listen a while to the pleasurable talk of her senior counsel, endure the impertinent starings of people dressed like women and individuals garbed like men, and lay bare her bosom to the barbed arrows, well aimed and thoroughly poisoned, from the bow in the strong and stalwart hands of the brawny district attorney.”
Ex-governor Robinson delivering his argument, Boston Globe
George Robinson rose to her defense. Dressed in his usual plain black suit, he spoke for almost four hours in a “low, earnest voice,” his speech “almost bare of eloquence.” Julian Ralph would deride it as “commonplace.” But Robinson’s folksy manner masked a serious purpose, for it was perfectly attuned to “the farmer instinct in the jurymen.” Robinson, said Ralph, “twanged his voice, he yaw yawed his last two vowels, he said ‘agin’ for against, and ‘warn’t’ for was it not.” (Elizabeth Jordan observed that he instructed the stenographer to correct his speech for the official record.) While he spoke, Lizzie watched him “intently, now and then fanning herself, occasionally tapping her rather pretty foot on the lower portion of the rail, now and then putting a bouquet to her nose, never taking her eyes from the face of the man upon whom much of her fate, she thinks, depends.”
In his opening statement, Jennings had essentially vouched for Lizzie Borden, reminding the jurors that he was a personal friend of the dead; for his part, Adams had done his best to stretch out the timeline in some places and shrink it in others to make it seem just possible that an outsider might have committed the murders; and Robinson had undermined the prosecution’s depiction of strained domestic relations in the Borden household and forced the police to contradict each other’s testimony. Robinson now sought to weave these threads together, enfolding his client in a cloak of reasonable doubt.
Robinson began by acknowledging the special horror of the crimes. He described the Borden murder case as “one of the most dastardly and diabolical crimes known to the history of Massachusetts.” The shock felt by the police led them, Robinson argued, to cast about desperately for someone to arrest: “Policemen are human, made out of men, and nothing else.” The police were also under immense public pressure to arrest someone, and Robinson observed, “Suspicion began to fall here and there.” But when they had Lizzie in their sights, they became convinced they had their killer. Robinson explained: “Once a theory possesses our minds, you know how tenaciously it holds its place.” A policeman is even more susceptible to this bias because “he is possessed and saturated with the thoughts and experiences he has with bad people.” “And,” as Robinson reminded the jury, “you do not get the greatest ability in the world inside a policeman’s coat.” (The New-Bedford Mercury shared this sentiment: “Not one police officer in a thousand is possessed of acute sensibility or a trained habit of observation.” “Success,” the paper continued, “is more often a matter of chance, or luck, or the stupidity of the criminal than it is of any well-directed conduct of an investigation.”) What else but a fatal combination of overzealousness and ineptitude could explain the police’s focus on Lizzie Borden?
Rather than the obvious suspect fingered by the police, Robinson presented Lizzie Borden as the personification of beleaguered innocence. Recalling “a little scene that struck [him] forcibly,” Robinson said: “Right at the moment of transition she stood there waiting, between the Court and the jury; and waited, in her quietness and calmness, until it was time for her to properly come forward. It flashed through my mind in a minute. There she stands, protected, watched over, kept in charge by the judges of this court and by the jury who have her in charge. If the little sparrow does not fall unnoticed to the ground, indeed, in God’s great providence, this woman has not been alone in this courtroom, but ever shielded by His watchful Providence from above, and by the sympathy and watch[ful] care of those who have her to look after.” In his formulation, Lizzie Borden is an orphan in need of paternal guidance and protection, a ward of the court rather than a prisoner in custody. Robinson emphasized her respectful silence and her apparent helplessness, noting she “waited . . . until it was time for her [to] properly come forward.” Robinson allied the defense with the protection of God and the legal system, leaving the commonwealth, represented by the prosecution, somehow opposed to justice, both secular and divine. Like Robinson himself, the judges and jury become reassuring paternal figures who take the place of her deceased father. It was a neat rhetorical sleight of hand, considering that Borden was on trial for having created her own orphanhood.
After lulling the jury with that reassuring set piece, he lowered the boom, warning that any mistake would be irreparable. He admonished the jury: “You are trying a capital case, a case that involves her human life, a verdict which against her calls for the imposition of but one penalty, and that is that she shall walk to her death.” Against that background, Robinson argued that the prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial and that “the proof must come up in your minds to a moral certainty . . . It must be beyond reasonable doubt.” Reasonable doubt, he explained, was the “reasonable doubt of reasonable men, confronted with the greatest crisis you have ever met in the world.” Robinson cautioned the jury to put out of mind any rumors or information about the case heard outside the courtroom. And he emphatically reminded jurors that it was not their responsibility “to unravel the mystery.”
Robinson then made a bold choice to discuss what was not in evidence. First, he suggested, slyly and without any basis, that Bridget had firsthand knowledge of the note or, at least, provided independent confirmation of Abby’s statement. This, Wigmore would later declare, was “the only blot on an otherwise nearly perfectly conducted trial.” Robinson did not explain its unaccountable disappearance; he merely remarked that such things happen. Second, he reminded the jury of Moody’s opening statement in which he declared that Lizzie Borden had tried to procure prussic acid the day before the murders. He remarked: “You have not heard any such evidence; it is not proved, the Court did not allow it to be proved and it is not in the case.” Third, he also discussed the roll of burned paper in the stove, a roll of paper laden with “dark insinuations.” Harrington had seen Dr. Bowen in front of the kitchen stove containing “what he said looked like the embers of a rolled up piece of paper, burned.” “That,” Robinson insisted, “was all.” But, he feared, “There was something in the manner that meanly intimated” that Dr. Bowen had some nefarious purpose in burning the paper. Robinson said he thought the prosecutors were going to argue that the missing hatchet handle had been in the fire, burned up somehow before the fire had finished reducing the paper to ashes. “Did you ever see such a funny fire in the world?” he asked. He professed to have been “troubled about it” himself until Fleet and Mullaly contradicted each other about whether the police found the hatchet handle in the cellar. He gleefully summarized: “Fleet didn’t see it and Mullaly did see it. Fleet didn’t take it out of the box and Mullaly saw him do it . . . So we rather think that the handle is still flying in the air, a poor orphan handle without a hatchet, flying around somewhere.”
After that comic interlude, Robinson turned to the evidence most favorable to the defense. He reminded the jury of the brutality of the crimes, arguing that the Bordens were felled by “well directed blows.” “Surely,” he continued, “we are prompted to say at the outset the perpetrator of that act knew how to handle the instrument . . . and it was not the careless, sudden, untrained doing of somebody who had been unfamiliar with such implements.” Robinson took special care to make the jurors see the murderer as a skilled male assassin. After considering the mechanics of the murders, Robinson continued, “You must conclude at the outset that such acts are morally and physically impossible for this young woman defendant.” Despite the spatter such blows would have produced, no blood—“[n]ot a spot”—had been noticed on her hair, face, or dress by any of the people who came to lend support in her time of crisis.
After invoking the specter of a mysterious male assassin, Robinson returned to his theme of Lizzie as innocent bystander. He transformed Lizzie into the paradigmatic “angel in the house,” her lack of alibi proof of her feminine normality. He argued: “They say she was in the house in the forenoon. Well, that may look to you like a very wrong place to be in. But it is her own home . . . I don’t know where I would want my daughter to be . . . than to say that she was at home, attending to the ordinary vocations of life, as a dutiful member of the household.” Robinson made a similar point about her account of her actions before and after the murders. She believed her stepmother had received a note and had gone out; therefore, she would have had no reason to look for her. As for the prosecution’s contention that “she must have seen . . . the dead body of Mrs. Borden . . . as she went up and down the stairs,” Robinson assured the jury, “Now if we had marched you up and down the stairs and told you nothing of what we wanted you to look at, there isn’t one of you that would have squinted under the bed, on that particular tread of stairs.” He insisted: “Now do not ask her to do things that nobody does.” As for her visit to the barn, corroborated by the ice cream peddler Lubinsky, “Is there anything unnatural or improbable in her going to the barn for anything she wanted?” In the same vein, he defended her shifting stories about her whereabouts. He said that variations in witnesses’ accounts were often a sign of truthfulness. “Honest people,” he claimed, “are not particular about punctuation and prepositions all the time.” More important, Robinson provided a belated rejoinder to Knowlton’s incredulity about Lizzie’s purported inability to recall whether she was upstairs or downstairs or out in the yard or barn at various points in the morning. It was a woman’s problem: “Do you suppose that your wives and daughters can tell the number of times they went up and down stairs six months ago on a given day?” Of course, it had not been a typical day, but Robinson emphatically added: “Not at all, or even the day before, unless they were very careful about something.”
Next Robinson denied that anything was amiss in the Borden household. He normalized the many locks in the Borden house. Yes, it was a well-secured home, but Robinson dismissed the many locks as “a matter of protection to keep people out.” Robinson rejected the notion that Andrew was a miser who deprived his daughters of domestic comforts. Robinson asked the jurors whether they lived as well: “Are all your houses warmed with steam? Do you have carpets on every one of your floors, stairs and all? Do you have pictures and pianos and a library, and all the conveniences of luxury? . . . Well, I congratulate you if you do.” Lizzie herself, he reminded the jury, had her own bank account and “property of her own.” He asked: “Did she want any more to live in comfort?” For him, this was proof Lizzie had no motive to commit the murders.
Leaving aside the unthinkable notion that Lizzie might have wanted independence rather than mere comfort, Robinson deliberately obscured the source of Lizzie Borden’s purported dissatisfaction with her circumstances. It arose from a sense of relative deprivation, not the literal absence of material comfort. She wanted, according to Alice Russell, “to live as others did,” and “others,” in this context, meant her more socially elevated cousins. Robinson could have revealed that Andrew had been “looking for a nice place for his daughters” in the more fashionable Hill district shortly before his death. But there was a risk in revealing Andrew’s apparent change of heart. It might have been seen as the act of a desperate man trying to mollify his disgruntled daughters and buy domestic peace, rather than—as Lizzie had suggested in her pretrial interview with Mrs. McGuirk of the New York Recorder—the decision of a considerate father trying to gratify them. That he was apparently contemplating such a significant acquisition also raised the question of whether this was part of a larger plan to put his affairs in order, to finalize a will that may well contain terms to which his daughters might object. Finally, Robinson ignored the most disturbing possibility, that Lizzie would have considered any residence, whatever the size, intolerable if it also housed her stepmother and father.
To the contrary, Robinson trivialized the much-discussed “ill feelings” in the household. He gave a rambling paean to departed mothers, a series of images, in Joe Howard’s words, “not fertile in fancy, nor poetic in sentiment, nor particularly felicitous in phrase.” Robinson’s point, however belabored, was that even a long-departed biological mother held a special place in a child’s affections. Therefore, Lizzie’s decision to stop calling Abby her mother had no great import because she was not, in biological fact, her mother. As for Lizzie’s correction of Assistant Marshal Fleet when he referred to Abby as her mother, Robinson observed: “There is nothing criminal about it . . . nothing that savors of a murderous purpose, is there?” He sarcastically reminded the jurors of Marthe Chagnon’s testimony in which she referred to her father’s second wife as her stepmother: “I advised the City Marshal to put a cordon around that house, so that there will not be another murder there.” More seriously, he agreed that Lizzie’s comments to the dressmaker Mrs. Gifford were “not a good way to talk” and admitted that Lizzie was “not a saint.” But he contended she was simply a plain speaker. Other people speak hastily, “yet we don’t read of murders in those houses.” He opined: “It is not the outspoken, blunt and hearty that are to be heard about it that do the injury.”
Most tellingly, Robinson made the tension in the Borden household purely feminine. This strategy had two components. First, it reinforced his version of the ill feeling in the household as an inconsequential disagreement among the ladies, an understandable tension between grown daughters and their stepmother. Second, it allowed him to emphasize the undiminished bond between father and daughter. Robinson consistently invoked Andrew Borden’s close relationship with Lizzie, presenting a picture of strong paternal attachment, as if her father’s love proved her innocence: “No man should be heard to say she murdered the man who so loved her.” He emphasized Lizzie and Andrew’s special understanding, remarking of Andrew Borden, “He was a man that wore nothing in the way of ornament, of jewelry but one ring, and the ring was Lizzie’s . . . and the ring stands as the pledge of plighted faith and love, that typifies and symbolizes the dearest relation that is ever created in life, that ring was the bond of union between the father and the daughter.” At the mention of their father’s ring, both Borden daughters wept openly . . . and Lizzie dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. This lachrymose display was, according to Joe Howard, “but a transient flood: her perfect composure was soon recovered, and, without a glance at any other individuals, she continued her attention to her counsel.”
It was fortunate that Lizzie’s tears provided a distraction, for Robinson was venturing onto unstable terrain. In theory, he presented the jury with a sentimental fantasy, defusing the tension in the Borden household and creating a portrait of idealized love and harmony particularly attractive to jurors who were fathers themselves. But his suppression of any discord between father and daughter and his decision to depict their relationship as a “union” (symbolized by a ring as “a pledge of plighted faith and love”) was unsettling. In his zeal to demonstrate Andrew’s undying love, he inflated the significance of the ring, reshuffling the roles of father and daughter into those of husband and wife. Insisting on Lizzie and Andrew’s intense attachment raised the possibility that this was, at its heart, a crime of passion. If so, then “periodic insanity”—a form of female temporary insanity in which otherwise respectable women killed husbands or lovers—might provide a way of making sense of the otherwise inexplicable crimes. And, as he pointed out, Lizzie was in the throes of “her monthly illness,” a fact he used to explain the bloody towels in the cellar, the tiny spot on the inside of her skirt, her inconsistent stories, her visit to the cellar the night after the murders, and even her premonitions of doom when she visited Alice Russell. He said: “You will recollect that Miss Lizzie’s monthly illness was continuing at that time, and we know from sad experience that there is [sic] many a woman at such a time as that is all unbalanced, her disposition disturbed, her mind disabled for a period of time.” His choice of language—“unbalanced,” “disturbed,” “disabled”—was uncomfortably close to the medical-criminological discussions characterizing menstruation as a time in which an otherwise sane woman might be tragically susceptible to an insane impulse.
