The Trial of Lizzie Borden(37)

It was surprising to hear the prosecution’s witness give testimony favorable to the defense, and even more surprising that the city engineer decided to perform such experiments. But there was something about the locked-room mystery of the Borden murders that turned everyone into an amateur detective. John Morse had conducted a similar experiment to see if he could have seen Abby’s corpse from the staircase. The consensus seemed to be that you could see a body if you were looking for one. Morse and family friend Mary Brigham also tested whether Abby’s fall would have reverberated through the house. Jennings, for his part, made a note in his journal: “Get 200 lbs man.”

Morse had come to the courthouse the first two days of the trial, waiting to be called as a witness. In the interim, he lingered in the corridor, “entertain[ing] a large number of listeners with tales of his experiences and life in the west.” When he took the stand, he again “held the close attention of his listeners.” Julian Ralph thought he resembled “Uncle Sam” (as drawn by Conde papers). He testified that he had arrived around 1:30 p.m. on the day before the murders and had seen no one but Andrew, Abby, and Bridget Sullivan. While he and Andrew sat in the sitting room that night, he heard someone come into the house and go directly upstairs. When he went to his room at 10:30 p.m., he noticed that Lizzie’s door was shut. The next morning, he ate breakfast with Andrew and Abby and then left at 8:40 a.m. to visit other relatives. According to Howard, “He was asked a multitudinosity of questions about the marriages, first and second, the ages of everybody in any way connected with the household, and a tediosity of apparently irrelevant questions as to what they had had for breakfast, who cooked it, whether the door which was shut was locked, whether the servants whom he didn’t see at all slept, and where he passed the day preceding and subsequent to the murder.” Robinson’s cross-examination returned to the breakfast fare. As Howard explained, “Governor Robinson developed in his confidential way from Mr. Morse that . . . there was nothing mean or stingy about the breakfast.” Morse did unintentionally provide a moment of levity. When asked Lizzie Borden’s age, he calculated thirty-three. She was, in fact, thirty-two, and “shook her head vigorously at the assertion.” As the New York Times put it, “There spoke the woman.”

To verify the prosecution’s timeline of events, a succession of witnesses traced Andrew Borden’s last walk the morning of August 4, 1892. Abraham Hart, the treasurer of Union Savings Bank, thought he looked “under the weather” when he saw him at the usual time of 9:30 a.m. John Burrill, the cashier of National Union Bank, observed Andrew speaking to “a colored man” about a loan. Andrew Borden then crossed the street and entered First Union Bank on North Main Street, where, according to Everett Cook, the cashier of First Union Bank, he stayed about ten minutes. From there, he moved on to inspect his commercial properties. He stopped to talk with Jonathan Clegg for about ten minutes about the arrangement for a new store at 92 South Main. Two carpenters, Joseph Shortsleeves and James Mather, working on the windows at Clegg’s new store, spotted him at about 10:30 a.m. (though during his cross-examination, Mather admitted that it could have been as late as 10:40 a.m.). The story took an odd turn, suggesting that Andrew Borden might have been preoccupied: He entered and walked to the back of the store. There, he picked up a broken lock and then laid it back down. He was upstairs for a few minutes. He came back downstairs, picked up the broken lock, and left the building, crossing the street. Then he stopped, recrossed the street, and greeted the carpenters. Moody cut off Shortsleeves before he could recount the conversation.

From Julian Ralph’s vantage point, he could see Moody’s restless hands: “He kept both hands behind him and busied them with his coattails violently and incessantly. He did his coattails up in a bundle, he rolled them up like a scroll, he tied them in a knot, he jiggled them with his fingers, and he pulled them apart.” Ralph concluded that each action corresponded to Moody’s emotional response to the witness: “Rolling them up indicated plain sailing, doing them up in a bundle meant triumphant success, knotting them up only occurred when the witness was obtuse, and sundering them indicated a failure to get the witness to understand him.” Howard fastened on to the one comical interlude in the testimony of Jonathan Clegg, the haberdasher: “Moody yelled himself red in the face that he might make the deaf Clegg hear, while Clegg yelled himself pale in the gills on the supposition that as he couldn’t hear himself Moody was in the same condition.”

What nugget Shortsleeves might have revealed paled before the excitement caused by the next witness, Bridget Sullivan, the Bordens’ twenty-six-year-old housekeeper. She was, in the words of Joe Howard, “a sensation.” He explained: “Her disappearance from the Borden premises two days after the tragedy, and her whereabouts since that day, have been a mystery.” She had, in fact, been employed by Mrs. Hunt at the New Bedford jail. She would have made a popular suspect but for Lizzie Borden’s own account of her movements on the day of the murders. Like Lizzie, she was known to be at the house during the murders; some even wondered if she might have been an accomplice. Others still resented the contrast between the two women’s circumstances: Bridget may have lived at a jail, yet, as the Sun reported: “Bridget goes shopping and knocks about the streets of New Bedford alone, or in any company she pleases, whenever she likes.” She was also suspiciously well-dressed: she wore a dress made of brown serge with lace around the neck and sported a black Van Dyck hat with a large feather. Ralph noticed that “Kid gloves of generous size concealed her hands.” Howard divined in the shape of her mouth “a love for the good things in life.” But her posture revealed her anxiety, for “she leaned on the left side of the rail, looked straight at Mr. Moody, and spoke so low that he had to tell her to speak louder.”