The Cases That Haunt Us (14 page)

Officer Joseph Hyde, on guard that night, reported that he saw Lizzie and Alice go down to the cellar with a kerosene lamp and carrying a slop pail. A few minutes later, Lizzie went down again by herself. He could see her bent over a sink but couldn’t tell what she was doing.

LIZZIE’S
STORY

On August 5, an interview appeared in the
Fall River Globe
with another of Lizzie’s uncles, Hiram Harrington, married to Andrew’s only sister, Luana. The interview claimed that Harrington had spoken with his niece the previous evening and that the reason she had not shown any emotion or grief was because “she is not naturally emotional.”

This became a key issue. Lizzie had seemed to many observers to be emotionally flat—not the type of response one would expect from someone grieving for her beloved father, if not her stepmother. Now, we certainly look closely at this factor in criminal behavioral analysis, but I am always wary of considering this subject in a vacuum; that is, strictly in and of itself. My several decades of experience in dealing with perpetrators, victims, and their families has told me that responses to horrible emotional trauma are very individual. It is true here, and it will be equally true when we consider the Charles Lindbergh Jr. and JonBenet Ramsey cases.

It is in the nature of my work that I have been around many people who have lost loved ones to violent crime. Some of them, such as Jack, Trudy, and Stephen Collins and Gene, Peggy, and Jeni Schmidt, will be familiar to our readers and have remained close friends. I have spoken with and spent time with others in the national spotlight who have suffered such loss, people such as John Walsh and Marc Klaas. And I can tell you that the way a person responds to the unspeakable and unimaginable—whether it is by screaming to the heavens or essentially shutting down—is so private, so interior, that until you really know the individual in question, it is extremely risky to make judgments based on that response. So if I were handling the Borden murder case, I would not, at this point, have been placing much store in Lizzie’s emotional reaction, one way or the other.

But from a forensic perspective, there were a couple of highly problematic areas. The first was the time line. Abby would have been killed around 9:30 in the morning. Andrew died a couple of minutes after 11 A.M. Did the killer hang around the house for an hour and a half, waiting for Andrew to return home? If so, where did he hide? The house was old- fashioned in design, without hallways and only a few tiny closets. To get from one room to another, you went directly through a door to that room. Doors that the family did not want to be opened for privacy were kept locked with furniture up against them. So did the intruder listen for Bridget and Lizzie and whoever else might be home and manage to stay out of their way for ninety minutes? If it was his plan to kill the elder Bordens—and no other motive is apparent—wouldn’t he have staked out the home for a time when they would be there without Lizzie, Emma, and Bridget? Did he leave and then return when he saw Andrew coming home and manage to get into the house a second time undetected? There was no sign of forced entry. In fact, Andrew himself couldn’t get in until Bridget unbolted the door.

Andrew Borden was wearing a gold ring, a silver watch, and had more than $80 in his pocket, all of which was undisturbed, nor was there evidence of anything having been taken from the house. Robbery or burglary were therefore unlikely scenarios.

The most logical way around these problems, of course, was that there was no intruder at all. That made Lizzie and Bridget the prime suspects.

Bridget’s account was pretty straightforward; there was nothing much for the police to sink their teeth into. But Lizzie’s story had some interesting details, holes, and inconsistencies, even if you discounted her supposedly inappropriate affect on learning of her father’s and stepmother’s murders.

There was no indication that Abby had left the house at all that morning. Her half-sister Sarah Whitehead, the only one Bridget could figure she might go visit, turned out not to be ill or even out of town that day and had not sent Abby a note. In fact, no one who knew Abby was ill and none knew anything about a note. Police searched the Borden house but could never find one.

Lizzie had told the police she had gone out to the barn shortly after her father returned home, which would account for why she hadn’t seen the murder or become a victim herself. But depending on whom she spoke to, she had differing versions as to why she was there. One had to do with the lead sinkers she’d need for her planned fishing trip. She told Alice Russell she needed lead for a broken window screen she wanted to repair. Neither statement squares with Officer Medley’s observation that the loft was so thick with dust that any footprint would have left a lasting impression.

A corollary detail was equally troubling. The day before the murders, Lizzie had gone to Smith’s Drug Store, minutes from where she lived, according to the clerk, Eli Bence. She wanted Bence to sell her ten cents’ worth of prussic acid—hydrogen cyanide in solution—saying she needed it to kill insects in a sealskin cape. Bence explained that he couldn’t sell it to her without a prescription, at which point he said she became visibly annoyed and claimed she’d had no trouble purchasing it in the past. Lizzie denied having been at Smith’s, though another clerk and a customer each identified her there between 10:00 and 11:30 in the morning. Later, another witness stated that Lizzie had tried to buy the poison from a different pharmacy on an earlier date.

Saturday, August 6, was the day of the funerals for Andrew and Abby Durfee Borden. The service was conducted by the Reverends Edwin Augustus Buck and William Walker Jubb, both representing the town’s central Congregational church. However, the burial at Oak Grove Cemetery did not take place as scheduled. The police had been informed that Dr. Wood wanted to conduct an examination of his own. So after the mourners had left the graveside, the undertaker brought the bodies back, after which the heads were removed and defleshed. Plaster casts were made of the skulls.

(Though untrue, it has long been said that for reasons undetermined, Andrew’s skull was never returned to his coffin and that its whereabouts are unknown to this day. Actually, it was later reburied at the grave site at his feet, as Abby’s was buried at her feat. Another grisly sidelight to this grisly case.)

That day, Emma and Lizzie published their offer of a reward of the then enormous sum of $5,000 to “any one who may secure the arrest and conviction of the person or persons, who occasioned the death of Mr. Andrew J. Borden and Wife.”

That same day, after the funeral, Fall River mayor John W. Coughlin and Marshal Rufus Hilliard informed Lizzie that she was officially a suspect.

On Sunday morning, Miss Russell and Emma observed Lizzie burning a dress of blue cotton Bedford cord in the kitchen stove. “What are you going to do?” Emma asked.

“I am going to burn this old thing up,” Lizzie replied. “It is covered with paint.”

Alice said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t let anybody see me do that, Lizzie,” then added, “I am afraid the burning of the dress was the worst thing you could have done, Lizzie.”

Lizzie replied curiously, “Oh, what made you let me do it?” and “Why did you let me burn the dress?”

The dress probably was, in fact, stained with paint. This was corroborated by others. But burning it was still odd at best. The Borden family was so frugal that they made rags out of clothing that could no longer be worn. Perhaps this was Lizzie’s first conscious or subconscious act of defiance against that frugality.

An inquest was held before Judge Josiah Coleman Blaisdell of the Second District Court, during which Lizzie testified. All testimony was kept secret. At this time she was not yet represented by counsel, and as we shall see, this became a critical factor in her subsequent defense.

She was formally arraigned, according to a warrant drawn up by Marshal Hilliard. The grand jury indictment relating to her father asserted:

That Lizzie Andrew Borden of Fall River, in the county of Bristol, at Fall River in the county of Bristol, on the fourth day of August, in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-two, in and upon one Andrew Jackson Borden, feloniously, willfully and of her malice aforethought, an assault did make, and with a certain weapon, to wit, a sharp cutting instrument, the name and a more particular description of which is to the Jurors unknown, him, the said Andrew Jackson Borden feloniously, willfully and of her malice aforethought did strike, cutting, beating and bruising, in and upon the head of him, the said Andrew Jackson Borden, divers, to wit, ten mortal wounds, of which said mortal wounds the said Andrew Jackson Borden then and there instantly died.

And so the Jurors aforesaid, upon their oath aforesaid, do say, that the said Lizzie Andrew Borden, the said Andrew Jackson Borden, in manner and form aforesaid, then and there feloniously, wilfully and of her malice aforethought did kill and murder; against the peace of said Commonwealth and contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided.

On Friday, August 12, her prominent attorney, Andrew J. Jennings, declared before the court held at the police station, “The prisoner pleads not guilty.”

She was taken to the jail in Taunton, Massachusetts, eight miles to the north, because Fall River had no facilities for long-term female prisoners. They’d never had the need.

On August 16, the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Borden, minus their heads, were finally interred in Oak Grove Cemetery.

And on August 22, six days of preliminary—or probable cause—hearings were held before Judge Blaisdell. Lizzie didn’t testify at these hearings, though the record of her secret testimony for the inquest was offered into evidence.

The murder weapon was still a problem and remains one. After completing his examination, Dr. Edward Wood testified that he could find no human blood or tissue on any of the hatchets from the Borden basement, and that the blood and hairs noted on one ax were from a cow.

That fact notwithstanding, at the end of the hearings, on September 1, Judge Blaisdell rendered his judgment, which is worth examining for its pained but resolute logic:

The long examination is now concluded, and there remains but for the magistrate to perform what he believes to be his duty. It would be a pleasure for him, and he would doubtless receive much sympathy if he could say, “Lizzie, I judge you probably not guilty. You may go home.” But upon the character of the evidence presented through the witnesses who have been so closely and thoroughly examined, there is but one thing to be done. Suppose for a single moment a man was standing there. He was found close by that guest chamber which, to Mrs. Borden, was a chamber of death. Suppose a man had been found in the vicinity of Mr. Borden, was the first to find the body, and the only account he could give of himself was the unreasonable one that he was out in the barn looking for sinkers, then he was out in the yard, then he was out for something else. Would there be any question in the minds of men what should be done with such a man? So there is only one thing to do, painful as it may be—the judgment of the Court is that you are probably guilty, and you are ordered committed to await the action of the Superior Court.

On November 7, the grand jury began three weeks of consideration of the case of Lizzie Andrew Borden. When prosecutor Hosea M. Knowlton completed his presentation, he invited Jennings to present a case for the defense. This was a great surprise, unheard of in Massachusetts. In effect, the two attorneys were conducting a trial before the grand jury.

For a time, it looked as if charges against Lizzie would be dismissed. There were no eyewitnesses, no clearly identified murder weapon, and questionable motive. The key circumstantial piece of the case against her was that she had the proximity and best opportunity to have committed both murders, and no other scenario was nearly as intellectually satisfying.

Then, on December 1, Alice Russell testified about the burning of the dress. The next day, Lizzie was charged with three counts of murder: of her father, of her stepmother, and of both of them together. The trial was set for June 5, 1893. Altogether, Lizzie was in Taunton Jail for nine months before that date arrived.

THE
TRIAL

Emma and Lizzie Borden had inherited their father’s estate. So together they had plenty of money and lined up the best defense that money could buy. In addition to Andrew Jennings, they hired a forty-two-year-old Boston attorney named Melvin Ohio Adams. Adams had been an assistant district attorney and was a specialist in criminal prosecution. And the key to the defense team was the Honorable George Dexter Robinson, fifty-nine, former senator, congressman, and governor of Massachusetts. In the “small world” department—or possibly the “conflict of interest” department, depending on your point of view—while governor, Robinson had appointed Justin Dewey, one of the trial’s three presiding judges, to the Massachusetts superior court. Emma and Lizzie paid Robinson the monumental sum of $25,000 for her defense, roughly five times what judges were paid annually. It has been asserted that Robinson would not agree to take the case until he was convinced of Lizzie’s innocence. At their first meeting, he advised Lizzie to start wearing black. If convicted, he informed her, she could face a sentence of death by hanging, although no woman had been executed in Massachusetts since 1778.

This is just one of many precursors to other cases and trials we see acted out with Lizzie Borden. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a suspect right after his arrest and then compared that to the way he looked in court months later. He’s cleaned up, cut his hair, wearing a conservative suit, with an intense, pensive, and vulnerable look in his eyes that says to the jury, this fine young man couldn’t possibly have done the hideous things you’ve heard described. Sometimes, when I’d walk into court and glance over at the defense table, I couldn’t tell which was the defendant and which the attorney.