The Trial of Lizzie Borden(40)

The Bordens’ neighbor and physician Dr. Seabury Bowen, “a most unwilling and obviously essential witness,” took the stand first. He testified that he saw Andrew Borden’s face “badly cut [and] covered with blood” but that his body was lying “apparently at ease, as any one would if they were lying asleep.” He asked Lizzie if she had seen anyone. Lizzie told him that she had been in the barn looking for irons. Dr. Bowen reported the death to Officer Allen, by then on the scene, and left to telegraph Emma in Fairhaven. Upon his return, Mrs. Churchill, the Bordens’ next-door neighbor, informed him that they found Mrs. Borden in the guest room upstairs. Initially he thought she might have fainted, though he denied that he had ever said “she had died of fright.” Upon closer examination, he realized she was dead. So far, the testimony was clear and undisputed. Next came sartorial matters at which Dr. Bowen was considerably less adept.

What was Lizzie Borden wearing? All agreed that Lizzie Borden changed her dress after the bodies were discovered and she went up to her room. She answered police questions wearing a pink wrapper. But what had she been wearing earlier in the morning? Some kind of blue dress, everyone agreed. At the inquest, Dr. Bowen described the original dress as a drab calico. Here, under pressure from Moody, who tried fruitlessly to persuade the doctor to amplify the description, he declared, “It was an ordinary, unattractive, common dress that I did not notice specially.” He refused to be drawn further. Robinson would later ask for Bridget Sullivan to be recalled. She testified that Lizzie was wearing a blue calico dress with clover-leaf figure and then changed after “the fuss was over” into a gingham dress, plain blue with a white border. So it appeared that there were two blue dresses worn that morning, a point given sinister import by the prosecution.

Melvin Adams, the dapper Boston trial lawyer, rose to question the doctor. He sought to establish that Dr. Bowen did not see Mrs. Borden’s body as he climbed the front stairs—an important point, given Lizzie’s descent from those stairs. (Both Adelaide Churchill and John Morse had seen the body from that vantage point.) He also foreshadowed a key defense argument about Lizzie’s inquest testimony: he asked what Dr. Bowen had given Lizzie for her nerves. Dr. Bowen initially prescribed bromo caffeine, an effervescent salt used to alleviate headaches, and, on Friday, added one-eighth of a grain of sulphate of morphine to be taken before bed. (A grain is the standard apothecary measurement by weight: Dr. Bowen’s initial dose was equivalent to 8 milligrams of morphine.) The next day he doubled the dose, a dose he continued while she was a witness at the inquest. Adams then asked about morphine’s mental effects. Bowen agreed that morphine in the higher quarter-grain dosage could affect memory and cause hallucinations, a point only partly undercut by Moody’s redirect establishing that Dr. Bowen only personally witnessed her taking the bromo caffeine. Joe Howard asked his readers: “If the administration of morphine tends to produce hallucinations in persons unused to taking morphine, what must have been Lizzie’s mental condition after several days of dosing with the stuff?”

Adelaide Churchill, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Dr. Seabury Bowen left the stand disgruntled. Adelaide Churchill, by contrast, relished her time in the spotlight. “A middle aged matron of comfortable build and genteel, placid face,” Adelaide Churchill was “short, stout, active, and willing.” When the police interviewed her on August 8, four days after the murders, she exclaimed: “Must I, am I obliged to tell you all? . . . Well, if I must,” she added, “I do not like to tell anything of my neighbor, but this is as it is.” Her moment had arrived—she entered the courtroom in a “stylish blue dress and black bonnet”—and she delivered her tale in rounded tones suitable for an elocution lesson. (Elizabeth Jordan, in particular, praised the “enunciation of her English,” which she took as a sign of her intelligence.) As Joe Howard put it, “No Mayday queen was ever happier than sister Churchill on the stand.”

Adelaide Churchill explained she was the widowed daughter of the former mayor Edward Buffinton and had lived in the house next door to the Bordens for almost all of her life. On the morning of the murders, she watched Andrew Borden leave in the morning before she went out to do her shopping, and on her way back from Hudner’s market, she had seen Bridget running back from Dr. Bowen’s house. After unloading her purchases in the kitchen, she looked out the window and saw an “excited or agitated” Lizzie leaning against the kitchen door. She asked, “Lizzie, what is the matter?” Lizzie replied, “Oh, Mrs. Churchill, do come over. Someone has killed father.” She eventually led the expedition to discover Abby Borden’s corpse in the guest bedroom, visible from the front stairs. Unlike Dr. Bowen, Adelaide offered a minute description of Lizzie’s dress. She denied it was the dark blue dress shown her by the prosecution. Instead, she said it had a light blue and white mixed groundwork woven together with “a dark navy blue diamond figure on which there was no spot of blood.” Adelaide Churchill would later be recalled and asked if she knew what “Bedford cord” was. She said she did not, but said she thought Lizzie had been wearing cotton.

Alice Russell, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society



Robinson returned to this point. As with Bridget Sullivan, Robinson led Adelaide Churchill through an exhaustive audit of Lizzie’s clothing, hair, and hands to show that there was no blood on her person. He also took the sting out of her original description of Lizzie’s manner, inducing her to rephrase her comment that Lizzie seemed “excited” to the more appropriate “appeared and looked distressed . . . and frightened.” Alive to the danger a vigilant neighbor—let alone a notorious curtain-twitcher like Mrs. Churchill—might pose to his theory of an outside assassin, he also explored Adelaide Churchill’s myriad household duties. Just as he led Bridget Sullivan to agree that an intruder could have slipped into the house while she was busy washing windows, he implied that Adelaide Churchill was far too busy in her own house to notice what might have been going on next door.