The Cases That Haunt Us (15 page)

To assist Hosea Knowlton for the prosecution, Massachusetts attorney general Arthur E. Pillsbury appointed forty-year-old William Henry Moody, the district attorney for Essex County, who would be appearing in his first murder trial. Moody would go on to a career as a congressman, secretary of the navy, U.S. attorney general, and Supreme Court justice. Shortly after the trial, Knowlton replaced Pillsbury as Massachusetts attorney general.

On May 31, 1893—five days before the scheduled start of the trial—an unexpected event, astounding in its proximity to the trial and profound in its implications, occurred in Fall River.

Stephen Manchester, a dairy farmer, came home from his milk deliveries to find his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Bertha, lying beside the black iron stove in the kitchen, hacked to death. Defense wounds and rips in her clothing suggested she had put up a fierce struggle with her assailant. Stephen and Bertha had lived alone in the farmhouse, both of his previous wives having left him, reportedly because he was both cheap and mean.

Dr. William Dolan again conducted the autopsy and described “twenty-three distinct and separate axe wounds on the back of the skull and its base.” Very similar to the wounds inflicted upon the back of Abby Borden’s head.

The crime took place in the morning, at the same time as Abby’s murder. There was little blood. Nothing of value was taken. It was likely that the killer had spent considerable time in the Manchester house.

The implications were clear to everyone in Fall River. An almost identical crime had taken place while the accused murderess was safely locked away in Taunton Jail—one of the best alibis I’ve ever heard. Attorney Andrew Jennings commented to the press almost gleefully, “Well, are they going to claim that Lizzie Borden did this too?” Suddenly, there was an alternative theory of the case based on an
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with similar MO who could not possibly have been Lizzie. What could create more “reasonable doubt”? The prosecution knew what had to be on the mind of every prospective member of the jury pool.

Then, on the very day Lizzie’s trial was to commence, a Portuguese immigrant in his late teens or early twenties named Jose Correira was arrested. He had worked as an itinerant laborer for Stephen Manchester and had gotten into a bitter argument with him over severance pay. Apparently, he had returned to the farm to have it out with Stephen, but when he wasn’t there, Correira confronted Bertha instead, murdering her in an overkill frenzy. He waited around the house for a while for his main target to return home, but after some time had passed, he reconsidered the situation and left.

The fact that Correira was Portuguese, and a Portuguese from the Azores at that, had the same effect on Fall River residents as the Jewish rumors surrounding Leather Apron had had on the East Enders of London during the Whitechapel murders. Poor and illiterate Portuguese immigrants were the lowest and most maligned caste in that part of Massachusetts, so if anyone was capable of such a ghastly crime as the murder of Andrew Borden and his wife, it would probably be “one of them.” A proper American certainly wouldn’t be capable of that.

It was later documented that Correira had not entered the United States from the Azores until April 1893, eight months after the Borden murders. But by the time this information became public, the Borden jury had already been chosen and sequestered. Of course, for everyone else, another subtext remained, almost as powerful: if one violent Portuguese immigrant could break in, attack Bertha Manchester with an ax or hatchet in a frenzy of overkill, then wait around for the man of the house to return, another one certainly could have done the same to the Bordens.

The trial of Lizzie Borden began on the morning of June 5, 1893, in the Superior Court for the County of Bristol. This was arguably the most celebrated criminal case of the century—rivaling the trials of Dred Scott, John Brown, the Haymarket bombers, even the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson—such was the interest and hoopla this spectacle created. The murders had long since become the prime topic of conversation not only in Fall River, but throughout New England, just as the Simpson-Goldman murders would rivet Los Angeles and the rest of the nation 102 years later. And as would happen with the Simpson trial, the national and world press converged upon the courthouse. Wealthy, prominent people just didn’t get hacked to death, and their children didn’t get accused of doing it. If this kind of thing could happen to a man like Andrew Borden and his wife, it could happen to anyone.

Knowlton, the district attorney of Fall River, was a reluctant prosecutor, forced into the role by Attorney General Arthur Pillsbury, who, at the time, would have been expected to try capital cases himself. But as the trial date approached, Pillsbury sensed pressure building from Lizzie’s supporters, particularly women’s groups and religious organizations. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, of which Lizzie was a member, publicly proclaimed its “unshaken faith in her, as a fellow worker and sister tenderly beloved.” Likewise, Lizzie’s ministers and fellow congregants at the Central Congregational Church—the most socially prominent church in Fall River—thought it impossible that the kind, demure, and dignified woman they knew could have committed such a pair of unthinkable acts.

The first day was devoted to selecting a jury—all white male—and then the prosecution presented its case. William Moody made the opening statements for the prosecution, presenting three essential arguments that were to represent the body of his case: that Lizzie Borden was predisposed to murder her father and stepmother and planned to do so; that the evidence would show that she did, in fact, murder them; and that her behavior and contradictory accounts were not consistent with innocence. Equally important, Moody made clear, was that the defendant had had the time to kill her stepmother while Bridget was washing the outside windows and was not in the house to hear anything. Then, when Andrew Borden came home, Bridget was up in her room in the attic lying down and, Moody contended, Lizzie was not in the barn but alone on the first floor of the house with her father.

Since there was no sign of struggle, the killer was logically someone well-known to both victims, who would not elicit any alarm. The only one who fit this criterion, the prosecution maintained, was Lizzie Borden herself.

The prosecution called Thomas Kieran, an architect and engineer who was sent in by the government to take full measurements of the Borden house. On cross-examination, he acknowledged that someone could have hidden in the closet in the front hall and not been seen by anyone inside the house. That afternoon, the judges had the jury visit the house to examine the crime scene for themselves.

John Morse testified that he had not seen Lizzie from the time he arrived at the Borden house on Wednesday until he returned after the murders on Thursday. He had been an early suspect, but convinced the police his alibi was sound and that he knew nothing about the crime. Interestingly, he was able to give a full and complete account of his own whereabouts at the time of the murders, down to the number of the streetcar he had ridden, the number on the conductor’s cap, and the names of everyone he had encountered. It is almost as if he knew he would need to have this corroborating information and so made careful note of all of it.

Bridget Sullivan testified that she had no knowledge of the communication from Abby’s sick friend that Lizzie had mentioned. When Robinson asked her if anyone could have entered the house while she was washing the outside windows, she admitted she had spent some time in a corner of the yard talking over the fence to the maid of the neighbors, Dr. and Mrs. Michael Kelly.

Crucial to the case was the evidence suggesting a motive. Knowlton and Moody called witnesses to establish that Andrew Borden was intending to write a new will. An old will was never found, nor its existence proven, although John Morse had testified that his brother-in-law had told him he had a will, but then later testified that Andrew had not mentioned one. The “new” will, according to Morse, was to leave Emma and Lizzie each $25,000, with the remainder of Andrew’s $500,000 estate going to Abby. Further, Knowlton developed the additional motive of Andrew’s intent to dispose of his farm to Abby, just as he had already transferred ownership of a house occupied by Abby’s half-sister Sarah Whitehead to her. This was apparently a sore point between the Borden sisters and their stepmother, and they feared it might be “handwriting on the wall” as to their father’s future intentions.

Hannah Gifford, a local dressmaker, recalled a conversation with Lizzie in March 1892, in which she had referred to Abby as Lizzie’s mother.

Lizzie had rebuked her for referring to Abby this way, calling her “a mean good-for-nothing.”

“Oh, Lizzie, you don’t mean that,” Gifford said she replied.

“Yes,” Lizzie countered, “I don’t have much to do with her.”

Bridget testified that in the two years she’d been with the Bordens, she’d never heard “any trouble with the family, no quarreling or anything of that kind.”

All in all, however, the testimony about Lizzie’s predisposition was ambiguous and contradictory. The relationship between Lizzie and her father could be proven neither cold and flinty nor warm and fuzzy. As is so often the case with human behavior, it depended on who was observing.

However, two rulings by the court became crucial to the eventual outcome of the trial.

On Saturday, June 10, the prosecution moved to enter Lizzie’s testimony at the inquest. George Robinson objected, since Lizzie had not been formally charged and was therefore not represented by counsel at the time. On Monday, when court resumed, the justices disallowed the introduction of Lizzie’s contradicting testimony. Although today the absence of counsel would weigh quite heavily in the defendant’s favor, many legal scholars were mystified by the decision.

Of the other contradictions that crept into the record, the defense got Dr. Bowen to acknowledge that the morphine he had prescribed for Lizzie could have left her thinking fuzzy and confused.

The most dramatic moment of the trial took place on the seventh day. Dr. Edward Wood testified about his examination of the victims’ stomach contents and said that he had found no evidence of poisoning. He had examined the hatchet head broken off from its handle—the one police felt most likely to have been the murder weapon—and could find no traces of blood. He said that the killer ought to have had considerable blood on his or her person. (Remember that Lizzie was seen by Mrs. Churchill within ten minutes of Andrew’s murder.) Told he would produce the actual skulls of the victims to show how the blade would have penetrated them, Lizzie fainted. A true lady, too sensitive to countenance such raw displays, she was allowed to leave the room. Certainly the men of the jury would not have held it against her.

But that this particular blade had been the murder weapon was only a theory. If the police and prosecution couldn’t definitively identify the weapon, then it might have been taken from the house by whoever committed the crimes, leaving a vast gulf of reasonable doubt in one of the key points of the case.

On Wednesday, June 14, the prosecution called Eli Bence, the drug-store clerk. The defense objected. After hearing arguments from both sides as to the relevance of Lizzie’s attempt to purchase prussic acid, the justices ruled that Bence’s testimony—and the entire issue of Lizzie’s alleged attempt to secure poison—was irrelevant and inadmissable.

There was, however, a chilling account from Alice Russell about a visit Lizzie had made to her on Wednesday, August 3, the evening before the murders. She quoted Lizzie as telling her, “I feel 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.”

After telling her friend about the sickness of her father and stepmother, she confided, “Sometimes I think our milk might be poisoned.”

When Russell had related that comment to the police on the day of the murders, they had seized the Borden milk supply and had it tested. Nothing unusual turned up.

Lizzie also mentioned a previous break-in to the house and two breakins to the barn. She even said she had seen a “strange man run around the house.”

“I feel afraid sometimes that father has an enemy,” she said.

Another item was Anna Howland Borden’s statement recalling Lizzie’s unhappy description of her home life as the two women returned (along with Anna’s sister Carrie Lindley Borden) from a nineteen-week trip through Europe that Andrew had given Lizzie as a thirtieth birthday gift. Some accounts have referred to Anna and Carrie as Lizzie’s cousins, but the trial record states that they were not related (though, of course, Borden was a prominent name through this part of New England). Anna Borden’s statement said that Lizzie did not want to return to her stifling home life after the freedom and stimulation of the grand European tour.

When the defense objected to the introduction of the statement, the judges ruled that the testimony was too ambiguous and did not point directly to ill will against either Lizzie’s father or stepmother, so it, too, was excluded.

The defense used only two days to present its case. Essentially, they called witnesses to verify the presence of a mysterious young man in the vicinity of the Borden home. The intruder scenario was their alternative theory of the case. They explained away the missing note by suggesting that women did not like publicity and therefore it was natural that no one would come forward to say she had requested Abby’s presence on the fateful morning. The defense emphasized that no blood was found on Lizzie, ignoring testimony that the way the murders were committed—the killer’s position relative to the victims’—the offender easily could have avoided being spattered.

Andrew Jennings tried to get across several points to the jury: Lizzie must be presumed innocent unless she could not be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There was no direct evidence against Lizzie, and some of the circumstantial links were weak. There was no weapon identified. There was no well-established motive, and nothing in the defendant’s character or previous behavior indicated she was capable of violence. Others had the opportunity to enter the house during the crucial time.