The Trial of Lizzie Borden(12)

But that was not the biggest surprise of the morning. After the pallbearers unburdened themselves, the family members departed. Then, after a discreet “pause of perhaps five minutes,” the policemen returned the caskets to the hearses; they had been ordered not to bury the bodies. The bodies were placed in the receiving vault to await further indignities. Dr. William Dolan, the county medical examiner, assisted by Dr. Frank W. Draper, his Suffolk County counterpart, performed autopsies in the Oak Grove Cemetery’s ladies’ lounge on Thursday, August 11, a week after the murders.





LIZZIE ON THE RACK




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By Tuesday, August 9, “the intense excitement in Fall River” grew to a “fever heat.” News broke that an inquest was to be held at the police station, presided over by the Second District Court’s Judge Josiah C. Blaisdell. Blaisdell, a long-serving judge of “remarkable vitality” and a former mayor, was a fitting choice. An inquest is a judicial inquiry, required by state law in cases of violent or unexplained death. It was a secret proceeding, open to neither the public nor the press. But that did not prevent reporters and ordinary citizens from following the comings and goings of likely participants. At 10:00 a.m., “a hack, containing Marshal Hilliard and Officer Harrington, had gone to the Borden house to convey Miss Lizzie and a friend” to the inquest. So acute was the public’s interest that “business was partially suspended in the center of the city as it had been on Thursday noon, when the story of the tragedy was first made known.” Those who lingered at the Borden house had their patience rewarded. Officer Patrick Doherty appeared at the house to bring Bridget Sullivan to the police station. Doherty was a handsome man with a sympathetic manner, one day shy of his thirty-third birthday. Bridget cried and insisted that she had already told all she knew. Doherty, however, managed to elicit some additional information: “[Bridget] remarked that things didn’t go in the house as they should, and that she wanted to leave and had threatened to do so several times.” She also claimed that she had remained out of loyalty to Abby Borden, whom she termed “a lovely woman.”

Inside the courtroom on the second floor of the police station, Judge Blaisdell, City Marshal Hilliard, the medical examiner, several officers, the stenographer, Annie White, and District Attorney Hosea Knowlton awaited Bridget Sullivan’s entrance. Judging by Bridget’s “deep distress,” it might as well have been a firing squad.

City Marshal Hilliard standing in front of the Central Police Station, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



District Attorney Hosea Knowlton, tasked with the investigation and eventual prosecution of the murders, dominated the room. He was a man prefiguring a Teddy Roosevelt guide to masculinity, a large man who seemed the incarnation of solidity, powerful in body as well as mind. As one reporter later rhapsodized, he had “a head as hard as iron set on a neck that is a tower for strength. His shoulders are a yard apart. His legs are the foundation of a bridge. He is by nature combative, and he snorts like a war horse.” Later, a colleague remembered him as a “manly man” with “no trace of anything artificial, either in his manner, his language, or his nature.” The son of an itinerant minister who ultimately led the Universalist Church in New Bedford, Knowlton had risen by his own conspicuous merit. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he established a thriving practice in New Bedford before entering public service. There, too, he met with success as a state representative and state senator before taking on the job as district attorney for the Southern District of Massachusetts. Within two years of the inquest, he would be sworn as Massachusetts attorney general. In that capacity, he recommended “exempting minors and women from the death penalty,” minors as a matter of sound public policy and women for “mostly sentimental” reasons. Later, he went further, arguing against capital punishment for any defendant: “That the punishment of murder by death does not tend to diminish or prevent that crime; that a man who is so far lost to reason as to conceive the commission of murder with deliberate and premeditated malice aforethought does not enter into a discussion with himself of the consequences of the crime; that the infliction of the death penalty is not in accord with the present advance of civilization, and that it is a relic of barbarism, which the community must surely outgrow, as it has already outgrown the rack, the whipping post, and the stake.” Whatever reservations he may have had about capital punishment, he thoroughly investigated the murders and conducted a searching inquest.

Bridget Sullivan seemed to be a cooperative witness; she answered Knowlton’s questions comprehensively. Her story was straightforward. After cleaning the breakfast dishes, she washed the outside windows, chatting with the neighbors’ housemaid, and then moved inside. She felt so tired that she decided to lie down. (Bridget had Thursday afternoons and Sundays off and may have simply been getting a head start on her half day.) Lizzie called for her, told her Andrew was dead, and sent her for Dr. Bowen. Although she had seen Lizzie pass through the kitchen in the early morning, she could give no additional information about Lizzie’s whereabouts that morning. After she testified, Bridget recovered in the matron’s apartment. Later, Officer Doherty escorted her back to the Borden home. But that was only a brief stop on her journey. After retrieving her belongings, she left for her cousin’s house on Division Street, never to return to the Second Street house.