The Trial of Lizzie Borden(26)
Meanwhile, Lizzie Borden languished in jail with little comfort from her legal team. Robinson’s hiring had raised her spirits temporarily—he had insisted on meeting her before undertaking her defense and, after two hours of discussion with her, declared his belief in her innocence. But she lamented to her old friend Annie Lindsey that her lawyers “gave her no hope of anything soon, or ever of an acquittal.” Her spirits were buoyed by simple comforts permitted in her cell: a few plants, candy sent by Annie, and a male cat named Daisy. Cats keep their own counsel. And Daisy, she said, was “the quietest boy I ever saw but is lots of company for me.” She won second place in a readers’ contest in the Boston Journal—the prize, a complete set of William Thackeray’s works. She would have preferred Dickens. During the preliminary hearing, she had been unable to make her way through Thackeray’s Pendennis. But the confinement wore on her. In May she wrote: “My spirits are at ebb tide. I see no ray of light amid the gloom. I try to fill up the waiting time as well as I can, but every day is longer and longer . . . My heart is heavy and the burden laid upon me seems greater than I can bear.”
AN ASYLUM MAY BE HER LOT
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While Borden waited, newspapers openly speculated about her sanity. One headline read: “An Asylum May Be Her Lot.” But she seemed so very normal. At school, the former principal of her grammar school recalled her as “an average scholar, neither being exceptionally smart, nor noticeably dull.” At home, she was a moody child, apparently of a melancholy disposition. A high school friend described her as “rather blue” on more than one occasion. Later, in her prophetic conversation with Alice Russell the night before the murders, Lizzie described her own pensiveness: “When I was at the table the other day . . . the girls were laughing and talking and having a good time, and this feeling came over me, and one of them spoke and said, ‘Lizzie, why don’t you talk.’?”
Whether or not she was inclined to depressive moods, Lizzie appeared normal to those around her. As the Pinkerton detective O. M. Hanscom observed, “the murder[s] looked like the work of a lunatic, while Lizzie appeared to be a level-headed self-possessed woman.” The journalist Elizabeth Jordan concurred: “No jury will believe that woman, with her firm face and steady intelligent eyes, ever did any important thing she had not subjected to the unobscured light of . . . reason.” For some, including the Boston Herald, Lizzie Borden’s apparent normality and “impassive coolness” during the investigation paradoxically provided the best evidence of her insanity: “There is nothing that tends more to induce the belief in insanity in this case than this most extraordinary exhibition.” An unnamed “official” source explained: “It is a well-known fact that one may be comparatively sound on all matters but one. That is the way I think it is with Lizzie.”
Nonetheless, the Boston Advertiser declared: “It is an open secret in police circles that the government officers believe that Miss Borden was insane at the time of the murders.” In this instance, the Advertiser was right. At the very least, the prosecutors thought the matter worth serious inquiry. First, they consulted experts. Attorney General Pillsbury wrote to Dr. George Jelly, the former superintendent of the McLean Asylum for the Insane and later chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Insanity, asking for an opinion about Lizzie’s sanity. Though he was often called upon to examine prominent individuals and pronounce upon their mental fitness, Jelly declined to do so, writing: “I do not think that the indications of insanity which you mention, are sufficiently strong or tangible enough to enable me to express an opinion.” Pillsbury then wrote to Jelly’s successor at McLean, Dr. Edward Cowles, to inquire if the “mechanical aspects of the case” indicated “that it was the work of a maniac.” Cowles replied that he did not know enough about “the mechanical aspects” to venture an opinion, but said that his “inferences have been against a theory of insanity in the person charged with the crime, from anything I have so far read concerning her conduct before or after the event.”
Both Knowlton and Pillsbury tried to persuade Andrew Jennings to permit a doctor to examine Lizzie Borden. Knowlton reported: “I could do nothing whatever with Jennings. He took exactly the position I feared he would, and seemed to regard it as some sort of surrender if he consented to anything.” After meeting Jennings in person on August 22, Pillsbury thought he had made some progress in convincing him to permit the prosecution’s expert to examine Lizzie Borden; however, Jennings “went away saying that he must see Adams” first. Adams’s advice was clear: “We could not do anything which suggested a doubt of her innocence.” Knowlton lamented: “We can make some investigations into family matters without him, but it will not be so thorough as it would be if we had his assistance.”
The police investigation into possible insanity in the Borden family, conducted by Moulton Batchelder of the Massachusetts state police force, turned up nothing of great interest. Most agreed that the Morse and Borden family tree had some odd apples but none could point to any rumors of insanity. Captain James C. Stafford declared that Lizzie Borden’s mother had been “a peculiar woman. She had a very bad temper.” Anna Howland averred, “I always heard that they were somewhat peculiar and odd.” Moulton Batchelder underlined the report of Sarah Morse’s temper as well as the following comment from neighbor Rescom Case: “We never heard that any one of them is or ever was insane but I think some of them are worse then [sic] insane.” The former city marshal, David S. Brigham, passed along the opinion that Lizzie was a “woman of bad disposition if they tell all what they know.” (Brigham was the manager of the B.M.C. Durfee Safe Deposit and Trust Company, on whose board Andrew Borden served, but it is not clear how he had gleaned his information.) George A. Pettey, who had lived at the Second Street house before it was converted into a single residence, said that Lizzie was known to be “ugly.” By contrast, Lizzie’s friend Mary Brigham (David Brigham’s daughter-in-law) told the Fall River Daily Herald: “She was a girl of very even temper. She never became excited . . . Her conduct since the murder has been just what anyone who knew her would expect.” Dr. Handy (who owned the Marion cottage where Lizzie had been expected to join her friends) denied that he had ever seen “any indications of insanity.” “Although hysteria is common to that sex,” he continued, “she never showed any signs of it.”