The Trial of Lizzie Borden(42)
On Sunday morning, Alice saw Lizzie by the kitchen stove. Emma asked Lizzie what she was going to do. Lizzie replied, “I am going to burn this old thing up; it is covered in paint.” Alice initially left the room, thought the better of it, returned, and said, “I wouldn’t let anyone see me do that, Lizzie.” She noticed it was a “cheap cotton Bedford cord,” light blue with dark figures. The next morning O. M. Hanscom, the Pinkerton detective employed by the family, asked Alice if all of Lizzie’s dresses were still in the house. When she saw Emma and Lizzie in the dining room, she declared, “I am afraid, Lizzie, the worst thing you could have done was to burn that dress. I have been asked about your dresses.”
Lizzie lamented, “Oh, what made you let me do it?”
Robinson’s cross-examination was a masterly attempt at damage control. He tried unsuccessfully to elicit dramatic descriptions of Lizzie Borden’s pallor and distress. He had more success with his familiar catalogue of Borden’s person, getting Alice to agree that there was no blood visible anywhere on Lizzie. He wanted to be as clear as possible that officers had already searched the house, and that they were present on Sunday when Lizzie burned the dress. Despite his skilled manner, Alice Russell seemed immune to his usually infallible charm. In response to her description of the dress as “Bedford cord,” not cambric, Robinson remarked, “No doubt about that, and any woman knows or ought to know the difference between the two, doesn’t she.” Alice tartly replied, “I don’t know as they do.” Yet, that rare rebuff did nothing to undermine Julian Ralph’s belief that Robinson was “without an equal in New York City as a cross-examiner,” observing that “he has not yet found a government witness whom he has not been able to turn more or less to his own account.” For Robinson, the critical point had been made: Lizzie Borden burned a cheap Bedford cord dress. For her part, Lizzie, according to Julian Ralph, “was much less interested in the testimony than the most unconcerned among the persons in the court.” Instead, she studied her fan, “putting the handle of it in her mouth and out again mechanically.”
As if to permit all a change of pace, three witnesses came and went with little fanfare. The local newsdealer John Cunningham recounted his own investigations as he tagged along with reporters from the Fall River Daily Globe and Fall River Daily Herald. Most significantly, he found the cellar door securely locked. In a report to the police, McHenry had observed spiderwebs across the doorjamb of at least a week’s growth. Cunningham also looked for tracks outside in the yard and saw none. Robinson pounced on this point: Did he know that Bridget Sullivan had walked that same area when she went over to the fence to have a chat with the Kellys’ “girl”? His powers of observation called into question, he provided a moment of levity describing Adelaide Churchill as running “triangular” toward the house. “Diagonally, you mean?” offered Moody genially.
Assistant Marshal John Fleet, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
Officer George Allen, the first policeman at the scene of the crime, and Deputy Sheriff Francis Wixon testified to their searches of the Borden house. Allen said that the front door had been locked and bolted. In response to Moody’s question, Allen testified that Lizzie Borden had not been crying. Describing Andrew’s body, he offered a poignant detail of his own: he had noticed “how small the ankles was [sic] for the shoes.” His testimony allowed the prosecution to introduce one of “the most horrible exhibits yet seen,” the blood-soaked handkerchief Allen had found lying by Abby’s feet. Moody held it aloft and it “hung like a scarlet banner before the general gaze.” Elizabeth Jordan pronounced it “the sensation of the day.” Lizzie averted her eyes and stared at the floor.
Wixon, a long-serving deputy sheriff, had been paying what he termed a “friendly call” to Marshal Hilliard as the alarm sounded. After Allen reported the full horrors of the situation, Wixon went directly over to see for himself. He had seen grievous wounds during his Civil War service and noticed that Andrew’s wounds appeared “fresh,” while the blood around Abby was coagulated and was “a dark maroon color.” Robinson was quick to object before he could state any conclusion about the order of deaths. Robinson, however, was most interested in what Wixon had done outside the Borden house. He had seen a man’s hat on the other side of the fence and, after climbing over, saw two other men at work. The men may not have seen anything that day, but the mere fact that Wixon could easily scale the fence provided a theoretical avenue of escape for an outside perpetrator.
Assistant Marshal John Fleet—tall, stalwart, good-looking, and intelligent—was the key police witness of the day. Fleet’s story had two key elements: he had heard Lizzie Borden’s declaration that Abby was not her mother and he had found the handleless hatchet. He arrived at the Borden house about 11:45 a.m. He viewed the bodies and then went to Lizzie’s bedroom. There, he found Reverend Buck and Alice Russell with Lizzie Borden. Lizzie told him that she had advised her father to lie down. She explained that she then went to the barn loft. When she returned, she found her father dead. Lizzie effectively ruled out Morse as a suspect and disavowed any suspicion of Bridget Sullivan. When asked if she had any idea who might have killed her father and her mother, she declared: “She is not my mother, sir; she is my stepmother; my mother died when I was a child.” She then volunteered that a man came to the house around nine that morning and, after prompting by Alice Russell, she repeated her story about the angry man who wanted to rent a store.